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Ponkapog Papers, by Thomas Bailey Aldrich
August, 1996 [Etext #625]
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PONKAPOG PAPERS
BY THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
TO FRANCIS BARTLETT
THESE miscellaneous notes and
essays are called <i>Ponkapog Papers</i>
not simply because they chanced, for
the most part, to be written within the
limits of the old Indian Reservation,
but, rather, because there is something
typical of their unpretentiousness in the
modesty with which Ponkapog assumes
to being even a village. The little
Massachusetts settlement, nestled under
the wing of the Blue Hills, has no illu-
sions concerning itself, never mistakes
the cackle of the bourg for the sound
that echoes round the world, and no
more thinks of rivalling great centres of
human activity than these slight papers
dream of inviting comparison between
themselves and important pieces of
literature. Therefore there seems some-
thing especially appropriate in the geo-
graphical title selected, and if the au-
thor's choice of name need further
excuse, it is to be found in the alluring
alliteration lying ready at his hand.
REDMAN FARM, <i>Ponkapog</i>,
1903.
CONTENTS
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
ASIDES
TOM FOLIO
FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES
A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"
PLOT AND CHARACTER
THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE
LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL
DECORATION DAY
WRITERS AND TALKERS
ON EARLY RISING
UN POETE MANQUE
THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD
ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION
WISHMAKERS' TOWN
HISTORICAL NOVELS
POOR YORICK
THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER
ROBERT HERRICK
LEAVES FROM A NOTE BOOK
IN his Memoirs, Kropotkin states the singular
fact that the natives of the Malayan Archipel-
ago have an idea that something is extracted from
them when their likenesses are taken by photo-
graphy. Here is the motive for a fantastic short
story, in which the hero--an author in vogue
or a popular actor--might be depicted as having
all his good qualities gradually photographed
out of him. This could well be the result of
too prolonged indulgence in the effort to "look
natural." First the man loses his charming sim-
plicity; then he begins to pose in intellectual
attitudes, with finger on brow; then he becomes
morbidly self-conscious, and finally ends in an
asylum for incurable egotists. His death might
be brought about by a cold caught in going out
bareheaded, there being, for the moment, no hat
in the market of sufficient circumference to meet
his enlarged requirement.
THE evening we dropped anchor in the Bay
of Yedo the moon was hanging directly over
Yokohama. It was a mother-of-pearl moon,
and might have been manufactured by any of
the delicate artisans in the Hanchodori quarter.
It impressed one as being a very good imitation,
but nothing more. Nammikawa, the cloisonne-
worker at Tokio, could have made a better
moon.
I NOTICE the announcement of a new edition
of "The Two First Centuries of Florentine
Literature," by Professor Pasquale Villari. I
am not acquainted with the work in question,
but I trust that Professor Villari makes it plain
to the reader how both centuries happened to be
first.
THE walking delegates of a higher civiliza-
tion, who have nothing to divide, look upon the
notion of property as a purely artificial creation
of human society. According to these advanced
philosophers, the time will come when no man
shall be allowed to call anything his. The bene-
ficent law which takes away an author's rights
in his own books just at the period when old
age is creeping upon him seems to me a hand-
some stride toward the longed-for millennium.
SAVE US from our friends--our enemies we
can guard against. The well-meaning rector of
the little parish of Woodgates, England, and
several of Robert Browning's local admirers
have recently busied themselves in erecting a
tablet to the memory of "the first known fore-
father of the poet." This lately turned up an-
cestor, who does not date very far back, was also
named Robert Browning, and is described on
the mural marble as "formerly footman and
butler to Sir John Bankes of Corfe Castle."
Now, Robert Browning the poet had as good
right as Abou Ben Adhem himself to ask to be
placed on the list of those who love their fellow
men; but if the poet could have been consulted
in the matter he probably would have preferred
not to have that particular footman exhumed.
However, it is an ill wind that blows nobody
good. Sir John Bankes would scarcely have
been heard of in our young century if it had
not been for his footman. As Robert stood day
by day, sleek and solemn, behind his master's
chair in Corfe Castle, how little it entered into
the head of Sir John that his highly respectable
name would be served up to posterity--like a
cold relish--by his own butler! By Robert!
IN the east-side slums of New York, some-
where in the picturesque Bowery district,
stretches a malodorous little street wholly
given over to long-bearded, bird-beaked mer-
chants of ready-made and second-hand clothing.
The contents of the dingy shops seem to have
revolted, and rushed pell-mell out of doors, and
taken possession of the sidewalk. One could
fancy that the rebellion had been quelled at this
point, and that those ghastly rows of complete
suits strung up on either side of the doorways
were the bodies of the seditious ringleaders.
But as you approach these limp figures, each
dangling and gyrating on its cord in a most
suggestive fashion, you notice, pinned to the
lapel of a coat here and there, a strip of paper
announcing the very low price at which you
may become the happy possessor. That dis-
sipates the illusion.
POLONIUS, in the play, gets killed--and not
any too soon. If it only were practicable to kill
him in real life! A story--to be called The
Passing of Polonius--in which a king issues a
decree condemning to death every long-winded,
didactic person in the kingdom, irrespective of
rank, and is himself instantly arrested and de-
capitated. The man who suspects his own
tediousness is yet to be born.
WHENEVER I take up Emerson's poems I find
myself turning automatically to his Bacchus.
Elsewhere, in detachable passages embedded in
mediocre verse, he rises for a moment to heights
not reached by any other of our poets; but
Bacchus is in the grand style throughout. Its tex-
ture can bear comparison with the world's best
in this kind. In imaginative quality and austere
richness of diction what other verse of our
period approaches it? The day Emerson wrote
Bacchus he had in him, as Michael Drayton said
of Marlowe, "those brave translunary things
that the first poets had."
IMAGINE all human beings swept off the face of
the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this
man in some vast city, New York or London.
Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his
solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring
at the door-bell!
No man has ever yet succeeded in painting an
honest portrait of himself in an autobiography,
however sedulously he may have set to work
about it. In spite of his candid purpose he
omits necessary touches and adds superfluous
ones. At times he cannot help draping his
thought, and the least shred of drapery becomes
a disguise. It is only the diarist who accom-
plishes the feat of self-portraiture, and he, with-
out any such end in view, does it unconsciously.
A man cannot keep a daily record of his com-
ings and goings and the little items that make
up the sum of his life, and not inadvertently
betray himself at every turn. He lays bare his
heart with a candor not possible to the self-
consciousness that inevitably colors premeditated
revelation. While Pepys was filling those small
octavo pages with his perplexing cipher he
never once suspected that he was adding a pho-
tographic portrait of himself to the world's gal-
lery of immortals. We are more intimately
acquainted with Mr. Samuel Pepys, the inner
man--his little meannesses and his large gener-
osities--then we are with half the persons we
call our dear friends.
THE young girl in my story is to be as sensitive
to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever any-
body praises her she breaks into colors.
IN the process of dusting my study, the other
morning, the maid replaced an engraving of
Philip II. of Spain up-side down on the man-
tel-shelf, and his majesty has remained in that
undignified posture ever since. I have no dis-
position to come to his aid. My abhorrence of
the wretch is as hearty as if he had not been
dead and--otherwise provided for these last
three hundred years. Bloody Mary of England
was nearly as merciless, but she was sincere and
uncompromising in her extirpation of heretics.
Philip II., whose one recorded hearty laugh was
occasioned by the news of the St. Bartholomew
massacre, could mask his fanaticism or drop it
for the time being, when it seemed politic to do
so. Queen Mary was a maniac; but the suc-
cessor of Torquemada was the incarnation of
cruelty pure and simple, and I have a mind to
let my counterfeit presentment of him stand on
its head for the rest of its natural life. I cor-
dially dislike several persons, but I hate no-
body, living or dead, excepting Philip II. of
Spain. He appears to give me as much trouble
as Charles I. gave the amiable Mr. Dick.
AMONG the delightful men and women whom
you are certain to meet at an English country
house there is generally one guest who is sup-
posed to be preternaturally clever and amusing
--"so very droll, don't you know." He recites
things, tells stories in costermonger dialect, and
mimics public characters. He is a type of a
class, and I take him to be one of the elemen-
tary forms of animal life, like the acalephae.
His presence is capable of adding a gloom to
an undertaker's establishment. The last time I
fell in with him was on a coaching trip through
Devon, and in spite of what I have said I must
confess to receiving an instant of entertainment
at his hands. He was delivering a little dis-
sertation on "the English and American lan-
guages." As there were two Americans on the
back seat--it seems we term ourselves "Amur-
ricans"--his choice of subject was full of tact.
It was exhilarating to get a lesson in pronuncia-
tion from a gentleman who said <i>boult</i> for bolt,
called St. John <i>Sin' Jun</i>, and did not know
how to pronounce the beautiful name of his
own college at Oxford. Fancy a perfectly sober
man saying <i>Maudlin</i> for Magdalen! Perhaps
the purest English spoken is that of the English
folk who have resided abroad ever since the
Elizabethan period, or thereabouts.
EVERY one has a bookplate these days, and the
collectors are after it. The fool and his book-
plate are soon parted. To distribute one's <i>ex-
libris</i> is inanely to destroy the only significance
it has, that of indicating the past or present
ownership of the volume in which it is placed.
WHEN an Englishman is not highly imaginative
he is apt to be the most matter-of-fact of mortals.
He is rarely imaginative, and seldom has an alert
sense of humor. Yet England has produced
the finest of humorists and the greatest of
poets. The humor and imagination which
are diffused through other peoples concentrate
themselves from time to time in individual
Englishmen.
THIS is a page of autobiography, though not
written in the first person: Many years ago a
noted Boston publisher used to keep a large
memorandum-book on a table in his personal
office. The volume always lay open, and was in
no manner a private affair, being the receptacle
of nothing more important than hastily scrawled
reminders to attend to this thing or the other. It
chanced one day that a very young, unfledged
author, passing through the city, looked in upon
the publisher, who was also the editor of a
famous magazine. The unfledged had a copy
of verses secreted about his person. The pub-
lisher was absent, and young Milton, feeling
that "they also serve who only stand and wait,"
sat down and waited. Presently his eye fell
upon the memorandum-book, lying there spread
out like a morning newspaper, and almost in
spite of himself he read: "Don't forget to see
the binder," "Don't forget to mail E----- his
contract," "Don't forget H-----'s proofs," etc.
An inspiration seized upon the youth; he took
a pencil, and at the tail of this long list of
"don't forgets " he wrote: "Don't forget to
accept A 's poem." He left his manuscript
on the table and disappeared. That afternoon
when the publisher glanced over his memo-
randa, he was not a little astonished at the last
item; but his sense of humor was so strong that
he did accept the poem (it required a strong
sense of humor to do that), and sent the lad a
check for it, though the verses remain to this
day unprinted. That kindly publisher was wise
as well as kind.
FRENCH novels with metaphysical or psycholo-
gical prefaces are always certain to be particu-
larly indecent.
I HAVE lately discovered that Master Harry
Sandford of England, the priggish little boy
in the story of "Sandford and Merton," has a
worthy American cousin in one Elsie Dinsmore,
who sedately pirouettes through a seemingly end-
less succession of girls' books. I came across
a nest of fifteen of them the other day. This
impossible female is carried from infancy up to
grandmotherhood, and is, I believe, still lei-
surely pursuing her way down to the tomb in an
ecstatic state of uninterrupted didacticism. There
are twenty-five volumes of her and the grand-
daughter, who is also christened Elsie, and is her
grandmother's own child, with the same preco-
cious readiness to dispense ethical instruction to
her elders. An interesting instance of hereditary
talent!
H-----'s intellect resembles a bamboo--slender,
graceful, and hollow. Personally, he is long and
narrow, and looks as if he might have been
the product of a rope-walk. He is loosely put
together, like an ill-constructed sentence, and
affects me like one. His figure is ungrammatical.
AMERICAN humor is nearly as ephemeral as
the flowers that bloom in the spring. Each gen-
eration has its own crop, and, as a rule, insists on
cultivating a new kind. That of 1860, if it were
to break into blossom at the present moment,
would probably be left to fade upon the stem.
Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing
hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety
is especially subject to very early frosts, as is
also the dialectic species. Mark Twain's humor
is not to be classed with the fragile plants; it
has a serious root striking deep down into
rich earth, and I think it will go on flowering
indefinitely.
I HAVE been imagining an ideal critical journal,
whose plan should involve the discharge of the
chief literary critic and the installment of a fresh
censor on the completion of each issue. To
place a man in permanent absolute control of a
certain number of pages, in which to express his
opinions, is to place him in a position of great
personal danger, It is almost inevitable that he
should come to overrate the importance of those
opinions, to take himself with far too much
seriousness, and in the end adopt the dogma of
his own infallibility. The liberty to summon
this or that man-of-letters to a supposititious
bar of justice is apt to beget in the self-ap-
pointed judge an exaggerated sense of superi-
ority. He becomes impatient of any rulings not
his, and says in effect, if not in so many words:
" I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let
no dog bark." When the critic reaches this
exalted frame of mind his slight usefulness is
gone.
AFTER a debauch of thunder-shower, the
weather takes the pledge and signs it with a
rainbow.
I LIKE to have a thing suggested rather than told
in full. When every detail is given, the mind
rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the
desire to use its own wings. The partly draped
statue has a charm which the nude lacks. Who
would have those marble folds slip from the
raised knee of the Venus of Melos? Hawthorne
knew how to make his lovely thought lovelier
by sometimes half veiling it.
I HAVE just tested the nib of a new pen on a
slight fancy which Herrick has handled twice
in the "Hesperides." The fancy, however, is
not Herrick's; it is as old as poetry and the ex-
aggeration of lovers, and I have the same privi-
lege as another to try my fortune with it:
UP ROOS THE SONNE, AND UP ROOS EMELYE
CHAUCER
When some hand has partly drawn
The cloudy curtains of her bed,
And my lady's golden head
Glimmers in the dusk like dawn,
Then methinks is day begun.
Later, when her dream has ceased
And she softly stirs and wakes,
Then it is as when the East
A sudden rosy magic takes
From the cloud-enfolded sun,
And full day breaks!
Shakespeare, who has done so much to discour-
age literature by anticipating everybody, puts the
whole matter into a nutshell:
But soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.
THERE is a phrase spoken by Hamlet which I
have seen quoted innumerable times, and never
once correctly. Hamlet, addressing Horatio,
says:
Give me that man
That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him
In my heart's core, ay, in my <i>heart of heart</i>.
The words italicized are invariably written
"heart of hearts"--as if a person possessed
that organ in duplicate. Perhaps no one living,
with the exception of Sir Henry Irving, is more
familiar with the play of Hamlet than my good
friend Mr. Bram Stoker, who makes his heart
plural on two occasions in his recent novel,
"The Mystery of the Sea." Mrs. Humphry
Ward also twice misquotes the passage in
"Lady Rose's Daughter."
BOOKS that have become classics--books that
ave had their day and now get more praise
than perusal--always remind me of venerable
colonels and majors and captains who, having
reached the age limit, find themselves retired
upon half pay.
WHETHER or not the fretful porcupine rolls itself
into a ball is a subject over which my friend
John Burroughs and several brother naturalists
have lately become as heated as if the question
involved points of theology. Up among the
Adirondacks, and in the very heart of the re-
gion of porcupines, I happen to have a modest
cottage. This retreat is called The Porcupine,
and I ought by good rights to know something
about the habits of the small animal from which
it derives its name. Last winter my dog Buster
used to return home on an average of three times
a month from an excursion up Mt. Pisgah with
his nose stuck full of quills, and <i>he</i> ought to
have some concrete ideas on the subject. We
two, then, are prepared to testify that the por-
cupine in its moments of relaxation occasion-
ally contracts itself into what might be taken
for a ball by persons not too difficult to please
in the matter of spheres. But neither Buster
nor I--being unwilling to get into trouble--
would like to assert that it is an actual ball.
That it is a shape with which one had better
not thoughtlessly meddle is a conviction that
my friend Buster stands ready to defend against
all comers.
WORDSWORTH'S characterization of the woman
in one of his poems as "a creature not too bright
or good for human nature's daily food" has
always appeared to me too cannibalesque to be
poetical. It directly sets one to thinking of the
South Sea islanders.
THOUGH Iago was not exactly the kind of per-
son one would select as a superintendent for a
Sunday-school, his advice to young Roderigo
was wisdom itself--"Put money in thy purse."
Whoever disparages money disparages every
step in the progress of the human race. I lis-
tened the other day to a sermon in which gold was
personified as a sort of glittering devil tempting
mortals to their ruin. I had an instant of natural
hesitation when the contribution-plate was passed
around immediately afterward. Personally, I be-
lieve that the possession of gold has ruined fewer
men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises
have been checked and what fine souls have been
blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will
never know. "After the love of knowledge,"
says Buckle, " there is no one passion which has
done so much good to mankind as the love of
money."
DIALECT tempered with slang is an admirable
medium of communication between persons who
have nothing to say and persons who would not
care for anything properly said.
DR. HOLMES had an odd liking for ingenious
desk-accessories in the way of pencil-sharpeners,
paper-weights, penholders, etc. The latest con-
trivances in this fashion--probably dropped
down to him by the inventor angling for a nibble
of commendation--were always making one
another's acquaintance on his study table. He
once said to me: "I 'm waiting for somebody to
invent a mucilage-brush that you can't by any
accident put into your inkstand. It would save
me frequent moments of humiliation."
THE deceptive Mr. False and the volatile Mrs.
Giddy, who figure in the pages of seventeenth
and eighteenth century fiction, are not tolerated in
modern novels and plays. Steal the burglar and
Palette the artist have ceased to be. A name
indicating the quality or occupation of the bearer
strikes us as a too transparent device. Yet there
are such names in contemporary real life. That
of our worthy Adjutant-General Drum may be
instanced. Neal and Pray are a pair of deacons
who linger in the memory of my boyhood. Sweet
the confectioner and Lamb the butcher are indi-
viduals with whom I have had dealings. The
old-time sign of Ketchum & Cheetam, Brokers,
in Wall Street, New York, seems almost too
good to be true. But it was once, if it is not
now, an actuality.
I HAVE observed that whenever a Boston author
dies, New York immediately becomes a great
literary centre.
THE possession of unlimited power will make
a despot of almost any man. There is a pos-
sible Nero in the gentlest human creature that
walks.
EVERY living author has a projection of him-
self, a sort of eidolon, that goes about in near
and remote places making friends or enemies
for him among persons who never lay eyes upon
the writer in the flesh. When he dies, this phan-
tasmal personality fades away, and the author
lives only in the impression created by his own
literature. It is only then that the world begins
to perceive what manner of man the poet, the
novelist, or the historian really was. Not until
he is dead, and perhaps some long time dead, is
it possible for the public to take his exact mea-
sure. Up to that point contemporary criticism
has either overrated him or underrated him, or
ignored him altogether, having been misled by
the eidolon, which always plays fantastic tricks
with the writer temporarily under its dominion.
It invariably represents him as either a greater
or a smaller personage than he actually is. Pre-
sently the simulacrum works no more spells,
good or evil, and the deception is unveiled. The
hitherto disregarded author is recognized, and
the idol of yesterday, which seemed so impor-
tant, is taken down from his too large pedestal
and carted off to the dumping-ground of inade-
quate things. To be sure, if he chances to have
been not entirely unworthy, and on cool exam-
ination is found to possess some appreciable
degree of merit, then he is set up on a new slab
of appropriate dimensions. The late colossal
statue shrinks to a modest bas-relief. On the
other hand, some scarcely noticed bust may
suddenly become a revered full-length figure.
Between the reputation of the author living and
the reputation of the same author dead there is
ever a wide discrepancy.
A NOT too enchanting glimpse of Tennyson is
incidentally given by Charles Brookfield, the
English actor, in his "Random Recollections."
Mr. Brookfield's father was, on one occasion,
dining at the Oxford and Cambridge Club with
George Venables, Frank Lushington, Alfred
Tennyson, and others. "After dinner," relates
the random recollector, "the poet insisted upon
putting his feet on the table, tilting back his
chair <i>more Americano</i>. There were strangers
in the room, and he was expostulated with for
his uncouthness, but in vain. 'Do put down
your feet!' pleaded his host. 'Why should I?'
retorted Tennyson. 'I 'm very comfortable as
I am.' 'Every one's staring at you,' said an-
other. 'Let 'em stare,' replied the poet, pla-
cidly. 'Alfred,' said my father, 'people will
think you're Longfellow.' Down went the
feet." That <i>more Americano</i> of Brookfield the
younger is delicious with its fine insular flavor,
but the holding up of Longfellow--the soul of
gentleness, the prince of courtesy--as a buga-
boo of bad manners is simply inimitable. It
will take England years and years to detect the
full unconscious humor of it.
GREAT orators who are not also great writers
become very indistinct historical shadows to the
generations immediately following them. The
spell vanishes with the voice. A man's voice is
almost the only part of him entirely obliterated
by death. The violet of his native land may be
made of his ashes, but nature in her economy
seems to have taken no care of his intonations,
unless she perpetuates them in restless waves of
air surging about the poles. The well-graced
actor who leaves no perceptible record of his
genius has a decided advantage over the mere
orator. The tradition of the player's method
and presence is associated with works of endur-
ing beauty. Turning to the pages of the drama-
tist, we can picture to ourselves the greatness of
Garrick or Siddons in this or that scene, in this
or that character. It is not so easy to conjure up
the impassioned orator from the pages of a dry
and possibly illogical argument in favor of or
against some long-ago-exploded measure of gov-
ernment. The laurels of an orator who is not a
master of literary art wither quickly.
ALL the best sands of my life are somehow get-
ting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I
could only reverse it! Were it in my power to
do so, would I?
SHAKESPEARE is forever coming into our affairs
--putting in his oar, so to speak--with some
pat word or sentence. The conversation, the
other evening, had turned on the subject of
watches, when one of the gentlemen present,
the manager of a large watch-making establish-
ment, told us a rather interesting fact. The
component parts of a watch are produced by
different workmen, who have no concern with
the complex piece of mechanism as a whole,
and possibly, as a rule, understand it imper-
fectly. Each worker needs to be expert in only
his own special branch. When the watch has
reached a certain advanced state, the work
requires a touch as delicate and firm as that of
an oculist performing an operation. Here the
most skilled and trustworthy artisans are em-
ployed; they receive high wages, and have the
benefit of a singular indulgence. In case the
workman, through too continuous application,
finds himself lacking the steadiness of nerve
demanded by his task, he is allowed without
forfeiture of pay to remain idle temporarily, in
order that his hand may recover the requisite
precision of touch. As I listened, Hamlet's
courtly criticism of the grave-digger's want of
sensibility came drifting into my memory.
"The hand of little employment hath the dain-
tier sense," says Shakespeare, who has left no-
thing unsaid.
IT was a festival in honor of Dai Butsu or some
one of the auxiliary deities that preside over the
destinies of Japland. For three days and nights
the streets of Tokio--where the squat little
brown houses look for all the world as if they
were mimicking the favorite sitting posture of
the Japanese--were crowded with smiling hol-
iday makers, and made gay with devices of
tinted tissue paper, dolphins, devils, dragons, and
mythical winged creatures which at night amia-
bly turned themselves into lanterns. Garlands
of these, arranged close together, were stretched
across the streets from ridgepoles to ridgepole,
and your jinrikisha whisked you through inter-
minable arbors of soft illumination. The spec-
tacle gave one an idea of fairyland, but then all
Japan does that.
A land not like ours, that land of strange flowers,
Of daemons and spooks with mysterious powers--
Of gods who breathe ice, who cause peach-blooms and rice
And manage the moonshine and turn on the showers.
Each day has its fair or its festival there,
And life seems immune to all trouble and care--
Perhaps only seems, in that island of dreams,
Sea-girdled and basking in magical air.
They've streets of bazaars filled with lacquers and jars,
And silk stuffs, and sword-blades that tell of old wars;
They've Fuji's white cone looming up, bleak and lone,
As if it were trying to reach to the stars.
They've temples and gongs, and grim Buddhas in throngs,
And pearl-powdered geisha with dances and songs:
Each girl at her back has an imp, brown or black,
And dresses her hair in remarkable prongs.
On roadside and street toddling images meet,
And smirk and kotow in a way that is sweet;
Their obis are tied with particular pride,
Their silken kimonos hang scant to the feet.
With purrs like a cat they all giggle and chat,
Now spreading their fans, and now holding them flat;
A fan by its play whispers, "Go now!" or "Stay!"
"I hate you! "I love you!"--a fan can say that!
Beneath a dwarf tree, here and there, two or three
Squat coolies are sipping small cups of green tea;
They sputter, and leer, and cry out, and appear
Like bad little chessmen gone off on a spree.
At night--ah, at night the long streets are a sight,
With garlands of soft-colored lanterns alight--
Blue, yellow, and red twinkling high overhead,
Like thousands of butterflies taking their flight.
Somewhere in the gloom that no lanterns illume
Stand groups of slim lilies and jonquils in bloom;
On tiptoe, unseen 'mid a tangle of green,
They offer the midnight their cups of perfume.
At times, sweet and clear from some tea-garden near,
A ripple of laughter steals out to your ear;
Anon the wind brings from a samisen's strings
The pathos that's born of a smile and a tear.
THE difference between an English audience
and a French audience at the theatre is marked.
The Frenchman brings down a witticism on the
wing. The Briton pauses for it to alight and
give him reasonable time for deliberate aim. In
English playhouses an appreciable number of
seconds usually precede the smile or the ripple
of laughter that follows a facetious turn of the
least fineness. I disclaim all responsibility for
this statement of my personal observation, since
it has recently been indorsed by one of London's
most eminent actors.
AT the next table, taking his opal drops of
absinthe, was a French gentleman with the
blase aspect of an empty champagne-bottle,
which always has the air of saying: "I have
lived!"
WE often read of wonderful manifestations of
memory, but they are always instances of the
faculty working in some special direction. It is
memory playing, like Paganini, on one string.
No doubt the persons performing the phenome-
nal feats ascribed to them have forgotten more
than they remember. To be able to repeat a
hundred lines of verse after a single reading is
no proof of a retentive mind, excepting so far as
the hundred lines go. A man might easily fail
under such a test, and yet have a good memory;
by which I mean a catholic one, and that I
imagine to be nearly the rarest of gifts. I have
never met more than four or five persons pos-
sessing it. The small boy who defined memory
as "the thing you forget with" described the
faculty as it exists and works in the majority of
men and women.
THE survival in publishers of the imitative in-
stinct is a strong argument in support of Mr.
Darwin's theory of the descent of man. One
publisher no sooner brings out a new style of
book-cover than half a dozen other publishers
fall to duplicating it.
THE cavalry sabre hung over the chimney-place
with a knot of violets tied to the dinted guard,
there being no known grave to decorate. For
many a year, on each Decoration Day, a sorrow-
ful woman had come and fastened these flowers
there. The first time she brought her offering
she was a slender girl, as fresh as her own vio-
lets. It is a slender figure still, but there are
threads of silver in the black hair.
FORTUNATE was Marcus Aurelius Antoninus,
who in early youth was taught "to abstain from
rhetoric, and poetry, and fine writing"--espe-
cially the fine writing. Simplicity is art's last
word.
The man is clearly an adventurer. In the seven-
teenth century he would have worn huge flint-
lock pistols stuck into a wide leather belt, and
been something in the seafaring line. The fel-
low is always smartly dressed, but where he
lives and how he lives are as unknown as
"what song the Sirens sang, or what name
Achilles assumed when he hid himself among
women." He is a man who apparently has no
appointment with his breakfast and whose din-
ner is a chance acquaintance. His probable
banker is the next person. A great city like
this is the only geography for such a character.
He would be impossible in a small country
town, where everybody knows everybody and
what everybody has for lunch.
I HAVE been seeking, thus far in vain, for the
proprietor of the saying that "Economy is sec-
ond or third cousin to Avarice." I went rather
confidently to Rochefoucauld, but it is not
among that gentleman's light luggage of cynical
maxims.
THERE is a popular vague impression that butch-
ers are not allowed to serve as jurors on mur-
der trials. This is not really the case, but it
logically might be. To a man daily familiar
with the lurid incidents of the <i>abattoir</i>, the
summary extinction of a fellow creature (whe-
ther the victim or the criminal) can scarcely
seem a circumstance of so serious moment
as to another man engaged in less strenuous
pursuits.
WE do not, and cannot, read many of the novels
that most delighted our ancestors. Some of our
popular fiction is doubtless as poor, but poor
with a difference. There is always a heavy de-
mand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation
the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
There is ragtime literature as well as ragtime
music for the many.
G----- is a man who had rather fail in a great
purpose than not accomplish it in precisely his
own way. He has the courage of his conviction
and the intolerance of his courage. He is op-
posed to the death penalty for murder, but he
would willingly have any one electrocuted who
disagreed with him on the subject.
I HAVE thought of an essay to be called "On
the Art of Short-Story Writing," but have given
it up as smacking too much of the shop. It
would be too <i>intime</i>, since I should have to deal
chiefly with my own ways, and so give myself
the false air of seeming to consider them of im-
portance. It would interest nobody to know
that I always write the last paragraph first, and
then work directly up to that, avoiding all di-
gressions and side issues. Then who on earth
would care to be told about the trouble my
characters cause me by talking too much?
They will talk, and I have to let them; but
when the story is finished, I go over the dia-
logue and strike out four fifths of the long
speeches. I fancy that makes my characters
pretty mad.
THIS is the golden age of the inventor. He is
no longer looked upon as a madman or a wiz-
ard, incontinently to be made away with. Two
or three centuries ago Marconi would not have
escaped a ropeless end with his wireless telegra-
phy. Even so late as 1800, the friends of one
Robert Fulton seriously entertained the lumi-
nous idea of hustling the poor man into an asy-
lum for the unsound before he had a chance to
fire up the boiler of his tiny steamboat on the
Hudson river. In olden times the pillory and
the whipping-post were among the gentler forms
of encouragement awaiting the inventor. If a
man devised an especially practical apple-peeler
he was in imminent danger of being peeled with
it by an incensed populace. To-day we hail
with enthusiasm a scientific or a mechanical
discovery, and stand ready to make a stock
company of it.
A MAN is known by the company his mind
keeps. To live continually with noble books,
with "high-erected thoughts seated in the heart
of courtesy," teaches the soul good manners.
THE unconventional has ever a morbid attrac-
tion for a certain class of mind. There is always
a small coterie of highly intellectual men and
women eager to give welcome to whatever is
eccentric, obscure, or chaotic. Worshipers at
the shrine of the Unpopular, they tingle with
a sense of tolerant superiority when they say:
"Of course this is not the kind of thing <i>you</i>
would like." Sometimes these impressionable
souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation
for their fetish.
I HEAR that B----- directed to have himself
buried on the edge of the pond where his duck-
stand was located, in order that flocks of migrat-
ing birds might fly over his grave every autumn.
He did not have to die, to become a dead shot.
A comrade once said of him: "Yes, B----- is
a great sportsman. He has peppered every-
thing from grouse in North Dakota to his best
friend in the Maine woods."
WHEN the novelist introduces a bore into his
novel he must not let him bore the reader. The
fellow must be made amusing, which he would
not be in real life. In nine cases out of ten
an exact reproduction of real life would prove
tedious. Facts are not necessarily valuable, and
frequently they add nothing to fiction. The art
of the realistic novelist sometimes seems akin to
that of the Chinese tailor who perpetuated the
old patch on the new trousers. True art selects
and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim
translation.
THE last meeting I had with Lowell was in the
north room of his house at Elmwood, the sleep-
ing-room I had occupied during a two years'
tenancy of the place in his absence abroad. He
was lying half propped up in bed, convales-
cing from one of the severe attacks that were
ultimately to prove fatal. Near the bed was a
chair on which stood a marine picture in aqua-
relle--a stretch of calm sea, a bit of rocky
shore in the foreground, if I remember, and a
vessel at anchor. The afternoon sunlight, falling
through the window, cast a bloom over the pic-
ture, which was turned toward Lowell. From
time to time, as he spoke, his eyes rested
thoughtfully on the water-color. A friend, he
said, had just sent it to him. It seemed to me
then, and the fancy has often haunted me since,
that that ship, in the golden haze, with top-
sails loosened, was waiting to bear his spirit
away.
CIVILIZATION is the lamb's skin in which bar-
barism masquerades. If somebody has already
said that, I forgive him the mortification he
causes me. At the beginning of the twentieth
century barbarism can throw off its gentle dis-
guise, and burn a man at the stake as compla-
cently as in the Middle Ages.
WHAT is slang in one age sometimes goes into
the vocabulary of the purist in the next. On
the other hand, expressions that once were not
considered inelegant are looked at askance in
the period following. The word "brass" was
formerly an accepted synonym for money; but
at present, when it takes on that significance, it
is not admitted into genteel circles of language.
It may be said to have seen better days, like
another word I have in mind--a word that has
become slang, employed in the sense which
once did not exclude it from very good society.
A friend lately informed me that he had "fired"
his housekeeper--that is, dismissed her. He
little dreamed that he was speaking excellent
Elizabethan.
THE "Journal des Goncourt" is crowded with
beautiful and hideous things, like a Japanese
Museum.
"AND she shuddered as she sat, still silent, on
her seat, and he saw that she shuddered." This
is from Anthony Trollope's novel, "Can You
Forgive Her?" Can you forgive him? is the
next question.
A LITTLE thing may be perfect, but perfection
is not a little thing. Possessing this quality, a
trifle "no bigger than an agate-stone on the
forefinger of an alderman" shall outlast the
Pyramids. The world will have forgotten all
the great masterpieces of literature when it for-
gets Lovelace's three verses to Lucasta on his
going to the wars. More durable than marble
or bronze are the words, "I could not love
thee, deare, so much, loved I not honor more."
I CALLED on the dear old doctor this afternoon
to say good-by. I shall probably not find him
here when I come back from the long voyage
which I have in front of me. He is very fragile,
and looks as though a puff of wind would blow
him away. He said himself, with his old-time
cheerfulness, that he was attached to this earth
by only a little piece of twine. He has percep-
tibly failed since I saw him a month ago; but
he was full of the wise and radiant talk to which
all the world has listened, and will miss. I
found him absorbed in a newly made card-cata-
logue of his library. "It was absurd of me to
have it done," he remarked. "What I really
require is a little bookcase holding only two
volumes; then I could go from one to the other
in alternation and always find each book as fresh
as if I never had read it." This arraignment of
his memory was in pure jest, for the doctor's
mind was to the end like an unclouded crystal.
It was interesting to note how he studied him-
self, taking his own pulse, as it were, and diag-
nosing his own case in a sort of scientific,
impersonal way, as if it were somebody else's
case and he were the consulting specialist. I
intended to spend a quarter of an hour with
him, and he kept me three hours. I went there
rather depressed, but I returned home leavened
with his good spirits, which, I think, will never
desert him, here or hereafter. To keep the heart
unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful,
reverent--that is to triumph over old age.
THE thing one reads and likes, and then forgets,
is of no account. The thing that stays, and
haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is
the sincere thing. I am describing the impres-
sion left upon me by Mr. Howells's blank-verse
sketch called "Father and Mother: A Mystery"
--a strangely touching and imaginative piece
of work, not unlike in effect to some of Mae-
terlinck's psychical dramas. As I read on, I
seemed to be standing in a shadow cast by some
half-remembered experience of my own in a
previous state of existence. When I went to
bed that night I had to lie awake and think it
over as an event that had actually befallen me.
I should call the effect <i>weird</i>, if the word had
not lately been worked to death. The gloom of
Poe and the spirituality of Hawthorne touch
cold finger-tips in those three or four pages.
FOR a character-study--a man made up en-
tirely of limitations. His conservatism and neg-
ative qualities to be represented as causing him
to attain success where men of conviction and
real ability fail of it.
A DARK, saturnine man sat opposite me at table
on board the steamer. During the entire run from
Sandy Hook to Fastnet Light he addressed no
one at meal-times excepting his table steward.
Seated next to him, on the right, was a viva-
cious gentleman, who, like Gratiano in the play,
spoke "an infinite deal of nothing." He made
persistent and pathetic attempts to lure his silent
neighbor (we had christened him "William the
Silent") into conversation, but a monosyllable
was always the poor result--until one day. It
was the last day of the voyage. We had stopped
at the entrance to Queenstown harbor to deliver
the mails, and some fish had been brought
aboard. The vivacious gentleman was in a
high state of excitement that morning at table.
"Fresh fish!" he exclaimed; "actually fresh!
They seem quite different from ours. Irish fish,
of course. Can you tell me, sir," he inquired,
turning to his gloomy shipmate, "what <i>kind</i> of
fish these are?" "Cork soles," said the saturn-
ine man, in a deep voice, and then went on
with his breakfast.
LOWELL used to find food for great mirth in
General George P. Morris's line,
Her heart and morning broke together.
Lowell's well-beloved Dr. Donne, however,
had an attack of the same platitude, and pos-
sibly inoculated poor Morris. Even literature
seems to have its mischief-making bacilli. The
late "incomparable and ingenious Dean of St.
Paul's" says,
The day breaks not, it is my heart.
I think Dr. Donne's case rather worse than
Morris's. Chaucer had the malady in a milder
form when he wrote:
Up roos the sonne, and up roos Emelye.
The charming naivete of it!
SITTING in Ellen Terry's dressing-room at the
Lyceum Theatre one evening during that lady's
temporary absence on the stage, Sarah Bern-
hardt picked up a crayon and wrote this pretty
word on the mirror--<i>Dearling</i>, mistaking it
for the word darling. The French actress lighted
by chance upon a Spenserianism now become
obsolete without good reason. It is a more
charming adjective than the one that has re-
placed it.
A DEAD author appears to be bereft of all earthly
rights. He is scarcely buried before old maga-
zines and newspapers are ransacked in search
of matters which, for reasons sufficient to him,
he had carefully excluded from the definitive
edition of his collected writings.
He gave the people of his best;
His worst he kept, his best he gave.
One can imagine a poet tempted to address
some such appeal as this to any possible future
publisher of his poems:
Take what thou wilt, a lyric or a line,
Take all, take nothing--and God send thee cheer!
But my anathema on thee and thine
If thou add'st aught to what is printed here.
THE claim of this country to call itself "The
Land of the Free" must be held in abeyance
until every man in it, whether he belongs or
does not belong to a labor organization, shall
have the right to work for his daily bread.
THERE is a strain of primitive poetry running
through the entire Irish race, a fleeting lyrical
emotion which expresses itself in a flash, usually
in connection with love of country and kindred
across the sea. I had a touching illustration of it
the other morning. The despot who reigns over
our kitchen was gathering a mess of dandelions on
the rear lawn. It was one of those blue and gold
days which seem especially to belong New Eng-
land. "It's in County Westmeath I 'd be this
day," she said, looking up at me. <I>"I'd go cool
my hands in the grass on my ould mother's
grave in the bit of churchyard foreninst
the priest's house at Mullingar."</i> I have
seen poorer poetry than that in the magazines.
SPEAKING of the late Major Pond, the well-
known director of a lecture bureau, an old client
of his remarked: "He was a most capable
manager, but it always made me a little sore to
have him deduct twenty-five per cent. commis-
sion." "Pond's Extract," murmured one of the
gentlemen present.
EACH of our great towns has its "Little Italy,"
with shops where nothing is spoken but Italian
and streets in which the alien pedestrian had
better not linger after nightfall. The chief in-
dustry of these exotic communities seems to be
spaghetti and stilettos. What with our Little
Italys and Chinatowns, and the like, an Ameri-
can need not cross the ocean in order to visit
foreign lands and enjoy the benefits of older
civilizations.
POETS are made as well as born, the proverb
notwithstanding. They are made possible by
the general love of poetry and the consequent
imperious demand for it. When this is non-
existent, poets become mute, the atmosphere
stifles them. There would have been no Shake-
speare had there been no Elizabethan audience.
That was an age when, as Emerson finely puts
it,
Men became
Poets, for the air was fame.
THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his car-
riage-stand at the corner opposite my house is
constantly touching on the extremes of human
experience, with probably not the remotest per-
ception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers
out for an airing, and now he drives the abscond-
ing bank-teller to the railway-station. Except-
ing as question of distance, the man has positively
no choice between a theatre and a graveyard. I
met him this morning dashing up to the portals
of Trinity Church with a bridal party, and this
afternoon, as I was crossing Cambridge Bridge,
I saw him creeping along next to the hearse, on
his way to Mount Auburn. The wedding af-
forded him no pleasure, and the funeral gave
him no grief; yet he was a factor in both. It is
his odd destiny to be wholly detached from the
vital part of his own acts. If the carriage itself
could speak! The autobiography of a public
hack written without reservation would be dra-
matic reading.
IN this blotted memorandum-book are a score
or two of suggestions for essays, sketches, and
poems, which I have not written, and never
shall write. The instant I jot down an idea the
desire to utilize it leaves me, and I turn away to
do something unpremeditated. The shabby vol-
ume has become a sort of Potter's Field where I
bury my literary intentions, good and bad, with-
out any belief in their final resurrection.
A STAGE DIRECTION: <i>exit time; enter
Eternity--with a soliloquy.</i>
ASIDES
TOM FOLIO
IN my early Boston days a gentle soul was
often to be met with about town, furtively
haunting old book-shops and dusty editorial
rooms, a man of ingratiating simplicity of man-
ner, who always spoke in a low, hesitating voice,
with a note of refinement in it. He was a de-
vout worshiper of Elia, and wrote pleasant dis-
cursive essays smacking somewhat of his master's
flavor--suggesting rather than imitating it--
which he signed "Tom Folio." I forget how
he glided into my acquaintanceship; doubtless in
some way too shy and elusive for remembrance.
I never knew him intimately, perhaps no one
did, but the intercourse between us was most
cordial, and our chance meetings and bookish
chats extended over a space of a dozen years.
Tom Folio--I cling to the winning pseu-
donym--was sparely built and under medium
height, or maybe a slight droop of the shoulders
made it seem so, with a fragile look about him
and an aspect of youth that was not his. En-
countering him casually on a street corner, you
would, at the first glance, have taken him for a
youngish man, but the second glance left you
doubtful. It was a figure that struck a note of
singularity and would have attracted your atten-
tion even in a crowd.
During the first four or five years of our ac-
quaintance, meeting him only out of doors or in
shops, I had never happened to see him with his
hat off. One day he recklessly removed it, and
in the twinkling of an eye he became an elderly
bald-headed man. The Tom Folio I once knew
had virtually vanished. An instant earlier he
was a familiar shape; an instant later, an almost
unrecognizable individual. A narrow fringe of
light-colored hair, extending from ear to ear
under the rear brim of his hat, had perpetrated
an unintentional deception by leading one to sup-
pose a head profusely covered with curly locks.
"Tom Folio," I said, "put on your hat and
come back! But after that day he never seemed
young to me.
I had few or no inklings of his life discon-
nected with the streets and the book-stalls, chiefly
those on Cornhill or in the vicinity. It is possi-
ble I am wrong in inferring that he occupied a
room somewhere at the South End or in South
Boston, and lived entirely alone, heating his cof-
fee and boiling his egg over an alcohol lamp. I
got from him one or two fortuitous hints of
quaint housekeeping. Every winter, it appeared,
some relative, far or near, sent him a large batch
of mince pies, twenty or thirty at least. He once
spoke to me of having laid in his winter pie, just
as another might speak of laying in his winter
coal. The only fireside companion Tom Folio
ever alluded to in my presence was a Maltese
cat, whose poor health seriously disturbed him
from time to time. I suspected those mince
pies. The cat, I recollect, was named Miss
Mowcher.
If he had any immediate family ties beyond
this I was unaware of them, and not curious to
be enlightened on the subject. He was more pic-
turesque solitary. I preferred him to remain so.
Other figures introduced into the background of
the canvas would have spoiled the artistic effect.
Tom Folio was a cheerful, lonely man--a
recluse even when he allowed himself to be
jostled and hurried along on the turbulent stream
of humanity sweeping in opposite directions
through Washington Street and its busy estu-
aries. He was in the crowd, but not of it. I
had so little real knowledge of him that I was
obliged to imagine his more intimate environ-
ments. However wide of the mark my conjec-
tures may have fallen, they were as satisfying to
me as facts would have been. His secluded
room I could picture to myself with a sense of
certainty--the couch (a sofa by day), the cup-
board, the writing-table with its student lamp,
the litter of pamphlets and old quartos and oc-
tavos in tattered bindings, among which were
scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb,
and perhaps--nay, surely--an <i>editio prin-
ceps</i> of the "Essays."
The gentle Elia never had a gentler follower
or a more loving disciple than Tom Folio. He
moved and had much of his being in the early
part of the last century. To him the South-Sea
House was the most important edifice on the
globe, remaining the same venerable pile it used
to be, in spite of all the changes that had be-
fallen it. It was there Charles Lamb passed the
novitiate of his long years of clerkship in the
East India Company. In Tom Folio's fancy a
slender, boyish figure was still seated, quill in
hand, behind those stately porticoes looking upon
Threadneedle Street and Bishopsgate. That
famous first paper in the "Essays," describing
the South-Sea House and the group of human
oddities which occupied desks within its gloomy
chambers, had left an indelible impression upon
the dreamer. Every line traced by the "lean
annuitant" was as familiar to Tom Folio as if
he had written it himself. Stray scraps, which
had escaped the vigilance of able editors, were
known to him, and it was his to unearth amid
a heap of mouldy, worm-eaten magazines, a
handful of leaves hitherto forgotten of all men.
Trifles, yes--but Charles Lamb's! "The
king's chaff is as good as other people's corn,"
says Tom Folio.
Often his talk was sweet and racy with old-
fashioned phrases; the talk of a man who loved
books and drew habitual breath in an atmosphere
of fine thought. Next to Charles Lamb, but at
a convenable distance, Izaak Walton was Tom
Folio's favorite. His poet was Alexander Pope,
though he thought Mr. Addison's tragedy of
"Cato" contained some proper good lines. Our
friend was a wide reader in English classics,
greatly preferring the literature of the earlier pe-
riods to that of the Victorian age. His smiling,
tenderly expressed disapprobation of various
modern authors was enchanting. John Keats's
verses were monstrous pretty, but over-orna-
mented. A little too much lucent syrup tinct
with cinnamon, don't you think? The poetry
of Shelley might have been composed in the
moon by a slightly deranged, well-meaning per-
son. If you wanted a sound mind in a sound
metrical body, why there was Mr. Pope's "Essay
on Man." There was something winsome and
by-gone in the general make-up of Tom Folio.
No man living in the world ever seemed to me
to live so much out of it, or to live more com-
fortably.
At times I half suspected him of a conva-
lescent amatory disappointment. Perhaps long
before I knew him he had taken a little senti-
mental journey, the unsuccessful end of which
had touched him with a gentle sadness. It was
something far off and softened by memory. If
Tom Folio had any love-affair on hand in my
day, it must have been of an airy, platonic sort
--a chaste secret passion for Mistress Peg Wof-
fington or Nell Gwyn, or possibly Mr. Wal-
ler's Saccharissa.
Although Tom Folio was not a collector--
that means dividends and bank balances--he
had a passion for the Past and all its belongings,
with a virtuoso's knowledge of them. A fan
painted by Vanloo, a bit of rare Nankin (he had
caught from Charles Lamb the love of old china),
or an undoctored stipple of Bartolozzi, gave him
delight in the handling, though he might not
aspire to ownership. I believe he would will-
ingly have drunk any horrible decoction from
a silver teapot of Queen Anne's time. These
things were not for him in a coarse, materialistic
sense; in a spiritual sense he held possession of
them in fee-simple. I learned thus much of his
tastes one day during an hour we spent together
in the rear showroom of a dealer in antiquities.
I have spoken of Tom Folio as lonely, but I
am inclined to think that I mis-stated it. He
had hosts of friends who used to climb the rather
steep staircase leading to that modest third-story
front room which I have imagined for him--a
room with Turkey-red curtains, I like to believe,
and a rare engraving of a scene from Mr. Ho-
garth's excellent moral of "The Industrious and
Idle Apprentices" pinned against the chimney
breast. Young Chatterton, who was not always
the best of company, dropped in at intervals.
There Mr. Samuel Pepys had a special chair
reserved for him by the window, where he could
catch a glimpse of the pretty housemaid over the
way, chatting with the policeman at the area
railing. Dr. Johnson and the unworldly author
of "The Deserted Village" were frequent visit-
ors, sometimes appearing together arm-in-arm,
with James Boswell, Esq., of Auchinleck, fol-
lowing obsequiously behind. Not that Tom
Folio did not have callers vastly more aristo-
cratic, though he could have had none plea-
santer or wholesomer. Sir Philip Sidney (who
must have given Folio that copy of the "Arca-
dia"), the Viscount St. Albans, and even two
or three others before whom either of these might
have doffed his bonnet, did not disdain to gather
round that hearthstone. Fielding, Smollett,
Sterne, Defoe, Dick Steele, Dean Swift--there
was no end to them! On certain nights, when all
the stolid neighborhood was lapped in slumber,
the narrow street stretching beneath Tom Folio's
windows must have been blocked with invisible
coaches and sedan-chairs, and illuminated by the
visionary glare of torches borne by shadowy
linkboys hurrying hither and thither. A man
so sought after and companioned cannot be
described as lonely.
My memory here recalls the fact that he had
a few friends less insubstantial--that quaint
anatomy perched on the top of a hand-organ, to
whom Tom Folio was wont to give a bite of his
apple; and the brown-legged little Neapolitan
who was always nearly certain of a copper when
this multi-millionaire strolled through the slums
on a Saturday afternoon--Saturday probably
being the essayist's pay-day. The withered
woman of the peanut-stand on the corner over
against Faneuil Hall Market knew him for a
friend, as did also the blind lead-pencil merchant,
whom Tom Folio, on occasions, safely piloted
across the stormy traffic of Dock Square. <i>No-
blesse oblige!</i> He was no stranger in those
purlieus. Without designing to confuse small
things with great, I may say that a certain strip
of pavement in North Street could be pointed
out as Tom Folio's Walk, just as Addison's
Walk is pointed out on the banks of the Cher-
well at Oxford.
I used to observe that when Tom Folio was
not in quest of a print or a pamphlet or some
such urgent thing, but was walking for mere
recreation, he instinctively avoided respectable
latitudes. He liked best the squalid, ill-kept
thoroughfares shadowed by tall, smudgy tene-
ment-houses and teeming with unprosperous,
noisy life. Perhaps he had, half consciously,
a sense of subtle kinship to the unsuccess and
cheerful resignation of it all.
Returning home from abroad one October
morning several years ago, I was told that that
simple spirit had passed on. His death had
been little heeded; but in him had passed away
an intangible genuine bit of Old Boston--as
genuine a bit, in its kind, as the Autocrat himself
--a personality not to be restored or replaced.
Tom Folio could never happen again!
Strolling to-day through the streets of the older
section of the town, I miss many a venerable
landmark submerged in the rising tide of change,
but I miss nothing quite so much as I do the
sight of Tom Folio entering the doorway of the
Old Corner Bookstore, or carefully taking down
a musty volume from its shelf at some melan-
choly old book-stall on Cornhill.
FLEABODY AND OTHER QUEER NAMES
WHEN an English novelist does us the
honor to introduce any of our country-
men into his fiction, he generally displays a
commendable desire to present something typi-
cal in the way of names for his adopted char-
acters--to give a dash of local color, as it were,
with his nomenclature. His success is seldom
commensurate to the desire. He falls into the
error of appealing to his invention, instead of
consulting some city directory, in which he
would find more material than he could exhaust
in ten centuries. Charles Reade might have
secured in the pages of such a compendium a
happier title than Fullalove for his Yankee
sea-captain; though I doubt, on the whole, if
Anthony Trollope could have discovered any-
thing better than Olivia Q. Fleabody for the
young woman from "the States" in his novel
called "Is He Popenjoy?"
To christen a sprightly young female advo-
cate of woman's rights Olivia Q. Fleabody was
very happy indeed; to be candid, it was much
better than was usual with Mr. Trollope, whose
understanding of American life and manners was
not enlarged by extensive travel in this country.
An English tourist's preconceived idea of us is
a thing he brings over with him on the steamer
and carries home again intact; it is as much a
part of his indispensable impedimenta as his hat-
box. But Fleabody is excellent; it was prob-
ably suggested by Peabody, which may have
struck Mr. Trollope as comical (just as Trollope
strikes <i>us</i> as comical), or, at least, as not seri-
ous. What a capital name Veronica Trollope
would be for a hoydenish young woman in a
society novel! I fancy that all foreign names
are odd to the alien. I remember that the signs
above shop-doors in England and on the Conti-
nent used to amuse me often enough, when I
was over there. It is a notable circumstance
that extraordinary names never seem extraordi-
nary to the persons bearing them. If a fellow-
creature were branded Ebenezer Cuttlefish he
would remain to the end of his days quite un-
conscious of anything out of the common.
I am aware that many of our American names
are sufficiently queer; but English writers make
merry over them, as if our most eccentric were
not thrown into the shade by some of their own.
No American, living or dead, can surpass the
verbal infelicity of Knatchbull-Hugessen, for ex-
ample--if the gentleman will forgive me for
conscripting him. Quite as remarkable, in a
grimly significant way, is the appellation of a
British officer who was fighting the Boers in the
Transvaal in the year of blessed memory 1899.
This young soldier, who highly distinguished
himself on the field, was known to his brothers-
in-arms as Major Pine Coffin. I trust that the
gallant major became a colonel later and is still
alive. It would eclipse the gayety of nations to
lose a man with a name like that.
Several years ago I read in the sober police
reports of "The Pall Mall Gazette" an account
of a young man named George F. Onions, who
was arrested (it ought to have been by "a
peeler") for purloining money from his em-
ployers, Messrs. Joseph Pickles & Son, stuff
merchants, of Bradford--<i>des noms bien idyl-
liques!</i> What mortal could have a more ludi-
crous name than Onions, unless it were Pickles,
or Pickled Onions? And then for Onions to rob
Pickles! Could there be a more incredible coin-
cidence? As a coincidence it is nearly sublime.
No story-writer would dare to present that fact
or those names in his fiction; neither would be
accepted as possible. Meanwhile Olivia Q. Flea-
body is <i>ben trovato</i>.
A NOTE ON "L'AIGLON"
THE night-scene on the battlefield of Wa-
gram in "L'Aiglon"--an episode whose
sharp pathos pierces the heart and the imagina-
tion like the point of a rapier--bears a striking
resemblance to a picturesque passage in Victor
Hugo's "Les Miserables." It is the one intense
great moment in the play, and has been widely
discussed, but so far as I am aware none of M.
Rostand's innumerable critics has touched on the
resemblance mentioned. In the master's ro-
mance it is not the field of Wagram, but the
field of Waterloo, that is magically repeopled
with contending armies of spooks, to use the
grim old Dutch word, and made vivid to the
mind's eye. The passage occurs at the end
of the sixteenth chapter in the second part of
"Les Miserables" (Cosette), and runs as
follows:
Le champ de Waterloo aujourd'hui a le calme qui
appartient a la terre, support impassible de l'homme,
et il resemble a toutes les plaines. La nuit pourtant
une espece de brume visionnaire s'en degage, et si
quelque voyageur s'y promene, s'il regarde, s'il ecoute,
s'il reve comme Virgile dans les funestes plaines de
Philippes, l'hallucination de la catastrophe le saisit.
L'effrayant 18 juin revit; la fausse colline-monument
s'efface, ce lion quelconque se dissipe, le champ de
bataille reprend sa realite; des lignes d'infanterie
ondulent dans la plaine, des galops furieux traversent
l'horizon; le songeur effare voit l'eclair des sabres,
l'etincelle des bayonnettes, le flamboiement des bombes,
l'entre-croisement monstrueux des tonnerres; il en-
tend, comme un rale au fond d'une tombe, la clameur
vague de la bataille-fantome; ces ombres, ce sont les
grenadiers; ces lueurs, ce sont les cuirassiers; . . .
tout cela n'est plus et se heurte et combat encore; et
les ravins s'empourprent, et les arbres frissonnent, et
il y a de la furie jusque dans les nuees, et, dans les
tenebres, toutes ces hauteurs farouches, Mont-Saint-
Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, Plance-
noit, apparaissent confusement couronnees de tour-
billons de spectres s'exterminant. <1>
Here is the whole battle scene in "L'Aiglon,"
with scarcely a gruesome detail omitted. The
vast plain glimmering in phantasmal light; the
ghostly squadrons hurling themselves against
<1> The field of Waterloo has to-day the peacefulness which be-
longs to earth, the impassive support of man, and is like all other
plains. At night, however, a kind of visionary mist is exhaled,
and if any traveler walks there, and watches and listens, and
dreams like Virgil on the sorrowful plains of Philippi, the hallu-
cination of the catastrophe takes possession of him. The terrible
June 18 relives; the artificial commemorative mound effaces itself,
the lion disappears, the field of battle assumes its reality; lines
of infantry waver on the plain, the horizon is broken by furious
charges of cavalry; the alarmed dreamer sees the gleam of sabres,
the glimmer of bayonets, the lurid glare of bursting shells, the
clashing of mighty thunderbolts; the muffled clamor of the
phantom conflict comes to him like dying moans from the tomb;
these shadows are grenadiers, these lights are cuirassiers . . .
all this does not really exist, yet the combat goes on; the ravines are
stained with purple, the trees tremble, there is fury even in the
clouds, and in the obscurity the sombre heights--Mont Saint-
Jean, Hougomont, Frischemont, Papelotte, and Plancenoit--ap-
pear dimly crowned with throngs of apparitions annihilating one
another.
One another (seen only through the eyes of the
poor little Duke of Reichstadt); the mangled
shapes lying motionless in various postures of
death upon the blood-stained sward; the moans
of the wounded rising up and sweeping by like
vague wailings of the wind--all this might be
taken for an artful appropriation of Victor
Hugo's text; but I do not think it was, though
it is possible that a faint reflection of a brilliant
page, read in early youth, still lingered on the
retina of M. Rostand's memory. If such were
the case, it does not necessarily detract from the
integrity of the conception or the playwright's
presentment of it.
The idea of repeopling old battlefields with
the shades of vanished hosts is not novel. In
such tragic spots the twilight always lays a dark
hand on the imagination, and prompts one to
invoke the unappeased spirit of the past that
haunts the place. One summer evening long
ago, as I was standing alone by the ruined walls
of Hougomont, with that sense of not being
alone which is sometimes so strangely stirred by
solitude, I had a sudden vision of that desperate
last charge of Napoleon's Old Guard. Marshal
Ney rose from the grave and again shouted
those heroic words to Drouet d'Erlon: "Are
you not going to get yourself killed?" For
an instant a thousand sabres flashed in the
air. The deathly silence that accompanied the
ghostly onset was an added poignancy to the
short-lived dream. A moment later I beheld a
hunched little figure mounted on a white horse
with housings of purple velvet. The reins lay
slack in the rider's hand; his three-cornered hat
was slouched over his brows, and his chin
rested on the breast of his great-coat. Thus he
slowly rode away through the twilight, and
nobody cried, <i>Vive l'Empereur!</i>
The ground on which a famous battle has
been fought casts a spell upon every man's
mind; and the impression made upon two men
of poetic genius, like Victor Hugo and Edmond
Rostand, might well be nearly identical. This
sufficiently explains the likeness between the
fantastic silhouette in "Les Miserables" and the
battle of the ghosts in "L'Aiglon." A muse so
rich in the improbable as M. Rostand's need
not borrow a piece of supernaturalness from
anybody.
PLOT AND CHARACTER
HENRY JAMES, in his paper on Anthony
Trollope, says that if Trollope "had taken
sides on the rather superficial opposition between
novels of character and novels of plot, I can
imagine him to have said (except that he never
expressed himself in epigram) that he preferred
the former class, inasmuch as character in itself
is plot, while plot is by no means character."
So neat an antithesis would surely never have
found itself between Mr. Trollope's lips if Mr.
James had not cunningly lent it to him. What-
ever theory of novel-writing Mr. Trollope may
have preached, his almost invariable practice
was to have a plot. He always had a <i>story</i> to
tell, and a story involves beginning, middle, and
end--in short, a framework of some description.
There have been delightful books filled wholly
with character-drawing; but they have not been
great novels. The great novel deals with human
action as well as with mental portraiture and
analysis. That "character in itself is plot" is
true only in a limited sense. A plan, a motive
with a logical conclusion, is as necessary to a
novel or a romance as it is to a drama. A group
of skillfully made-up men and women lounging
in the green-room or at the wings is not the
play. It is not enough to say that this is Romeo
and that Lady Macbeth. It is not enough to
inform us that certain passions are supposed to
be embodied in such and such persons: these
persons should be placed in situations develop-
ing those passions. A series of unrelated scenes
and dialogues leading to nothing is inadequate.
Mr. James's engaging epigram seems to me
vulnerable at both ends--unlike Achilles.
"Plot is by no means character." Strictly
speaking, it is not. It appears to me, however,
that plot approaches nearer to being character
than character does to being plot. Plot necessi-
tates action, and it is impossible to describe a
man's actions' under whatever conditions, with-
out revealing something of his character, his
way of looking at things, his moral and mental
pose. What a hero of fiction <i>does</i> paints him
better than what he <i>says</i>, and vastly better than
anything his creator may say of him. Mr.
James asserts that "we care what happens to
people only in proportion as we know what
people are." I think we care very little what
people are (in fiction) when we do not know
what happens to them.
THE CRUELTY OF SCIENCE
IN the process of their experiments upon the
bodies of living animals some anatomists do
not, I fear, sufficiently realize that
The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance, finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
I am not for a moment challenging the neces-
sity of vivisection, though distinguished sur-
geons have themselves challenged it; I merely
contend that science is apt to be cold-hearted,
and does not seem always to take into consider-
ation the tortures she inflicts in her search for
knowledge.
Just now, in turning over the leaves of an old
number of the "London Lancet," I came upon
the report of a lecture on experimental physiology
delivered by Professor William Rutherford be-
fore a learned association in London. Though
the type had become antiquated and the paper
yellowed in the lapse of years, the pathos of
those pages was alive and palpitating.
The following passages from the report will
illustrate not unfairly the point I am making.
In the course of his remarks the lecturer ex-
hibited certain interesting experiments on living
frogs. Intellectually I go very strongly for Pro-
fessor Rutherford, but I am bound to confess
that the weight of my sympathy rests with the
frogs.
Observe this frog [said the professor], it is regard-
ing our manoeuvres with a somewhat lively air. Now
and then it gives a jump. What the precise object of
its leaps may be I dare not pretend to say; but prob-
ably it regards us with some apprehension, and desires
to escape.
To be perfectly impartial, it must be admitted
that the frog had some slight reason for appre-
hension. The lecturer proceeded:
I touch one of its toes, and you see it resents the
molestation in a very decided manner. Why does it so
struggle to get away when I pinch its toes? Doubt-
less, you will say, because it feels the pinch and would
rather not have it repeated. I now behead the animal
with the aid of a sharp chisel. . . . The headless trunk
lies as though it were dead. The spinal cord seems to
be suffering from shock. Probably, however, it will
soon recover from this. . . . Observe that the animal
has now <i>spontaneously</i> drawn up its legs and arms,
and it is sitting with its neck erect just as if it had
not lost its head at all. I pinch its toes, and you see
the leg is at once thrust out as if to spurn away the
offending instrument. Does it still feel? and is the
motion still the result of the volition?
That the frog did feel, and delicately hinted
at the circumstance, there seems to be no room to
doubt, for Professor Rutherford related that
having once decapitated a frog, the animal sud-
denly bounded from the table, a movement that
presumably indicated a kind of consciousness.
He then returned to the subject immediately
under observation, pinched its foot again, the
frog again "resenting the stimulation." He then
thrust a needle down the spinal cord. "The
limbs are now flaccid," observed the experi-
menter; "we may wait as long as we please,
but a pinch of the toes will never again cause
the limbs of this animal to move." Here is
where congratulations can come in for <i>la gre-
nouille</i>. That frog being concluded, the lec-
turer continued:
I take another frog. In this case I open the cranium
and remove the brain and medulla oblongata. . . .
I thrust a pin through the nose and hang the animal
thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendent
legs without any difficulty. . . . I gently pinch the
toes. . . . The leg of the same side is pulled up. . . .
I pinch the same more severely. . . . Both legs are
thrown into motion.
Having thus satisfactorily proved that the
wretched creature could still suffer acutely, the
professor resumed:
The cutaneous nerves of the frog are extremely sen-
sitive to acids; so I put a drop of acetic acid on the
outside of one knee. This, you see, gives rise to most
violent movements both of arms and legs, and notice
particularly that the animal is using the toes of the
leg on the same side for the purpose of rubbing the
irritated spot. I dip the whole animal into water
in order to wash away the acid, and now it is all at
rest again. . . . I put a drop of acid on the skin
over the lumbar region of the spine. . . . Both feet
are instantly raised to the irritated spot. The animal
is able to localize the seat of irritation. . . . I wash
the acid from the back, and I amputate one of the
feet at the ankle. . . . I apply a drop of acid over
the knee of the footless leg. . . . Again, the animal
turns the leg towards the knee, as if to reach the irri-
tated spot with the toes; these, however, are not now
available. But watch the other foot. The <i>foot of the
other leg</i> is now being used to rub away the acid. The
animal, finding that the object is not accomplished
with the foot of the same side, uses the other one.
I think that at least one thing will be patent
to every unprejudiced reader of these excerpts,
namely--that any frog (with its head on or
its head off) which happened to make the per-
sonal acquaintance of Professor Rutherford must
have found him poor company. What benefit
science may have derived from such association
I am not qualified to pronounce upon. The lec-
turer showed conclusively that the frog is a
peculiarly sensitive and intelligent little batra-
chian. I hope that the genial professor, in the
years which followed, did not frequently con-
sider it necessary to demonstrate the fact.
LEIGH HUNT AND BARRY CORNWALL
IT has recently become the fashion to speak
disparagingly of Leigh Hunt as a poet, to
class him as a sort of pursuivant or shield-bearer
to Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Truth to tell,
Hunt was not a Keats nor a Shelley nor a Cole-
ridge, but he was a most excellent Hunt. He
was a delightful essayist--quite unsurpassed,
indeed, in his blithe, optimistic way--and as a
poet deserves to rank high among the lesser
singers of his time. I should place him far
above Barry Cornwall, who has not half the
freshness, variety, and originality of his com-
peer.
I instance Barry Cornwall because there has
seemed a disposition since his death to praise
him unduly. Barry Cornwall has always struck
me as extremely artificial, especially in his dra-
matic sketches. His verses in this line are
mostly soft Elizabethan echoes. Of course a
dramatist may find it to his profit to go out of
his own age and atmosphere for inspiration; but
in order successfully to do so he must be a dra-
matist. Barry Cornwall fell short of filling the
role; he got no further than the composing of
brief disconnected scenes and scraps of solilo-
quies, and a tragedy entitled Mirandola, for
which the stage had no use. His chief claim to
recognition lies in his lyrics. Here, as in the
dramatic studies, his attitude is nearly always
affected. He studiously strives to reproduce the
form and spirit of the early poets. Being a Lon-
doner, he naturally sings much of rural English
life, but his England is the England of two or
three centuries ago. He has a great deal to say
about the "falcon," but the poor bird has the
air of beating fatigued wings against the book-
shelves of a well-furnished library! This well-
furnished library was--if I may be pardoned a
mixed image--the rock on which Barry Corn-
wall split. He did not look into his own heart,
and write: he looked into his books.
A poet need not confine himself to his indi-
vidual experiences; the world is all before him
where to choose; but there are subjects which
he had better not handle unless he have some
personal knowledge of them. The sea is one of
these. The man who sang,
The sea! the sea! the open sea!
The blue, the fresh, <i>the ever free!</i>
(a couplet which the Gifted Hopkins might have
penned), should never have permitted himself to
sing of the ocean. I am quoting from one of
Barry Cornwall's most popular lyrics. When I
first read this singularly vapid poem years ago,
in mid-Atlantic, I wondered if the author had
ever laid eyes on any piece of water wider than
the Thames at Greenwich, and in looking over
Barry Cornwall's "Life and Letters" I am not
so much surprised as amused to learn that he was
never out of sight of land in the whole course
of his existence. It is to be said of him more
positively than the captain of the Pinafore said
it of himself, that he was hardly ever sick at
sea.
Imagine Byron or Shelley, who knew the
ocean in all its protean moods, piping such
thin feebleness as
The blue, the fresh, the ever free!
To do that required a man whose acquaintance
with the deep was limited to a view of it from
an upper window at Margate or Scarborough.
Even frequent dinners of turbot and whitebait
at the sign of The Ship and Turtle will not en-
able one to write sea poetry.
Considering the actual facts, there is some-
thing weird in the statement,
I 'm on the sea! I 'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be.
The words, to be sure, are placed in the mouth
of an imagined sailor, but they are none the
less diverting. The stanza containing the distich
ends with a striking piece of realism:
If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.
This is the course of action usually pursued
by sailors during a gale. The first or second
mate goes around and tucks them up comfort-
ably, each in his hammock, and serves them
out an extra ration of grog after the storm is
over.
Barry Cornwall must have had an exception-
ally winning personality, for he drew to him the
friendship of men as differently constituted as
Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster.
He was liked by the best of his time, from
Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne,
who caught a glimpse of the aged poet in his
vanishing. The personal magnetism of an au-
thor does not extend far beyond the orbit of his
contemporaries. It is of the lyrist and not of
the man I am speaking here. One could wish
he had written more prose like his admirable
"Recollections of Elia."
Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note,
but when he does it is extremely sweet. That
little ballad in the minor key beginning,
Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream,
was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh
Hunt, though not without questionable manner-
isms, was rich in the inspiration that came but
infrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full
of natural felicities. He also was a bookman,
but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew
how to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the
coinage with his own head. In "Hero and Lean-
der" there is one line which, at my valuing, is
worth any twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall
has written:
So might they now have lived, and so have died;
<i>The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side</i>.
Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane
Carlyle gave him lingers on everybody's lip.
That and the rhyme of "Abou Ben Adhem and
the Angel" are spice enough to embalm a man's
memory. After all, it takes only a handful.
DECORATION DAY
HOW quickly Nature takes possession of
a deserted battlefield, and goes to work
repairing the ravages of man! With invisible
magic hand she smooths the rough earthworks,
fills the rifle-pits with delicate flowers, and
wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent
drapery of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp out-
line of the spot is lost in unremembering grass.
Where the deadly rifle-ball whistled through the
foliage, the robin or the thrush pipes its tremu-
lous note; and where the menacing shell de-
scribed its curve through the air, a harmless
crow flies in circles. Season after season the
gentle work goes on, healing the wounds and
rents made by the merciless enginery of war,
until at last the once hotly contested battle-
ground differs from none of its quiet surround-
ings, except, perhaps, that here the flowers take
a richer tint and the grasses a deeper emerald.
It is thus the battle lines may be obliterated
by Time, but there are left other and more last-
ing relics of the struggle. That dinted army
sabre, with a bit of faded crepe knotted at its
hilt, which hangs over the mantel-piece of the
"best room" of many a town and country house
in these States, is one; and the graven headstone
of the fallen hero is another. The old swords
will be treasured and handed down from gener-
ation to generation as priceless heirlooms, and
with them, let us trust, will be cherished the
custom of dressing with annual flowers the rest-
ing-places of those who fell during the Civil
War.
With the tears a Land hath shed
Their graves should ever be green.
Ever their fair, true glory
Fondly should fame rehearse--
Light of legend and story,
Flower of marble and verse.
The impulse which led us to set apart a day
for decorating the graves of our soldiers sprung
from the grieved heart of the nation, and in our
own time there is little chance of the rite being
neglected. But the generations that come after
us should not allow the observance to fall into
disuse. What with us is an expression of fresh
love and sorrow, should be with them an ac-
knowledgment of an incalculable debt.
Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our
national holidays. How different from those sul-
len batteries which used to go rumbling through
our streets are the crowds of light carriages,
laden with flowers and greenery, wending their
way to the neighboring cemeteries! The grim
cannon have turned into palm branches, and the
shell and shrapnel into peach blooms. There is
no hint of war in these gay baggage trains, ex-
cept the presence of men in undress uniform,
and perhaps here and there an empty sleeve to
remind one of what has been. Year by year
that empty sleeve is less in evidence.
The observance of Decoration Day is un-
marked by that disorder and confusion common
enough with our people in their holiday moods.
The earlier sorrow has faded out of the hour,
leaving a softened solemnity. It quickly ceased
to be simply a local commemoration. While
the sequestered country churchyards and burial-
places near our great northern cities were being
hung with May garlands, the thought could not
but come to us that there were graves lying
southward above which bent a grief as tender
and sacred as our own. Invisibly we dropped
unseen flowers upon those mounds. There is a
beautiful significance in the fact that, two years
after the close of the war, the women of Colum-
bus, Mississippi, laid their offerings alike on
Northern and Southern graves. When all is
said, the great Nation has but one heart.
WRITERS AND TALKERS
AS a class, literary men do not shine in con-
versation. The scintillating and playful
essayist whom you pictured to yourself as the
most genial and entertaining of companions,
turns out to be a shy and untalkable individual,
who chills you with his reticence when you
chance to meet him. The poet whose fascinating
volume you always drop into your gripsack on
your summer vacation--the poet whom you
have so long desired to know personally--is a
moody and abstracted middle-aged gentleman,
who fails to catch your name on introduction,
and seems the avatar of the commonplace. The
witty and ferocious critic whom your fancy had
painted as a literary cannibal with a morbid
appetite for tender young poets--the writer of
those caustic and scholarly reviews which you
never neglect to read--destroys the un-lifelike
portrait you had drawn by appearing before you
as a personage of slender limb and deprecat-
ing glance, who stammers and makes a painful
spectacle of himself when you ask him his
opinion of "The Glees of the Gulches," by Popo-
catepetl Jones. The slender, dark-haired novel-
ist of your imagination, with epigrammatic
points to his mustache, suddenly takes the shape
of a short, smoothly-shaven blond man, whose
conversation does not sparkle at all, and you
were on the lookout for the most brilliant of
verbal fireworks. Perhaps it is a dramatist you
have idealized. Fresh from witnessing his de-
lightful comedy of manners, you meet him face
to face only to discover that his own manners
are anything but delightful. The play and the
playwright are two very distinct entities. You
grow skeptical touching the truth of Buffon's
assertion that the style is the man himself. Who
that has encountered his favorite author in the
flesh has not sometimes been a little, if not
wholly, disappointed?
After all, is it not expecting too much to
expect a novelist to talk as cleverly as the clever
characters in his novels? Must a dramatist
necessarily go about armed to the teeth with
crisp dialogue? May not a poet be allowed to
lay aside his singing-robes and put on a con-
ventional dress-suit when he dines out? Why
is it not permissible in him to be as prosaic
and tiresome as the rest of the company? He
usually is.
ON EARLY RISING
A CERTAIN scientific gentleman of my
acquaintance, who has devoted years to
investigating the subject, states that he has never
come across a case of remarkable longevity un-
accompanied by the habit of early rising; from
which testimony it might be inferred that they
die early who lie abed late. But this would be
getting out at the wrong station. That the
majority of elderly persons are early risers is due
to the simple fact that they cannot sleep morn-
ings. After a man passes his fiftieth milestone
he usually awakens at dawn, and his wakeful-
ness is no credit to him. As the theorist con-
fined his observations to the aged, he easily
reached the conclusion that men live to be old
because they do not sleep late, instead of per-
ceiving that men do not sleep late because they
are old. He moreover failed to take into ac-
count the numberless young lives that have been
shortened by matutinal habits.
The intelligent reader, and no other is sup-
posable, need not be told that the early bird
aphorism is a warning and not an incentive.
The fate of the worm refutes the pretended
ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes
to illustrate the advantage of early rising and
does so by showing how extremely dangerous
it is. I have no patience with the worm, and
when I rise with the lark I am always careful
to select a lark that has overslept himself.
The example set by this mythical bird, a myth-
ical bird so far as New England is concerned,
has wrought wide-spread mischief and discom-
fort. It is worth noting that his method of ac-
complishing these ends is directly the reverse of
that of the Caribbean insect mentioned by Laf-
cadio Hearn in his enchanting "Two Years in
the French West Indies"--a species of colossal
cricket called the wood-kid; in the creole tongue,
<i>cabritt-bois</i>. This ingenious pest works a sooth-
ing, sleep-compelling chant from sundown until
precisely half past four in the morning, when
it suddenly stops and by its silence awakens
everybody it has lulled into slumber with its in-
sidious croon. Mr. Hearn, with strange obtuse-
ness to the enormity of the thing, blandly re-
marks: "For thousands of early risers too poor
to own a clock, the cessation of its song is the
signal to get up." I devoutly trust that none of
the West India islands furnishing such satanic
entomological specimens will ever be annexed
to the United States. Some of our extreme ad-
vocates of territorial expansion might spend a
profitable few weeks on one of those favored
isles. A brief association with that <i>cabritt-bois</i>
would be likely to cool the enthusiasm of the
most ardent imperialist.
An incalculable amount of specious sentiment
has been lavished upon daybreak, chiefly by poets
who breakfasted, when they did breakfast, at
mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their
practice was better than their precept--or their
poetry. Thomson, the author of "The Castle
of Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved
apostrophe,
Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,
was one of the laziest men of his century. He
customarily lay in bed until noon meditating
pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to
be seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both
hands in his waistcoat pockets, eating peaches
from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English
poets who at that epoch celebrated what they
called "the effulgent orb of day" were denizens
of London, where pure sunshine is unknown
eleven months out of the twelve.
In a great city there are few incentives to
early rising. What charm is there in roof-tops
and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even
from a nightmare? What is more depressing
than a city street before the shop-windows have
lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem
asleep," as Wordsworth says, and nobody is
astir but the belated burglar or the milk-and-
water man or Mary washing off the front steps?
Daybreak at the seaside or up among the moun-
tains is sometimes worth while, though famil-
iarity with it breeds indifference. The man
forced by restlessness or occupation to drink the
first vintage of the morning every day of his life
has no right appreciation of the beverage, how-
ever much he may profess to relish it. It is
only your habitual late riser who takes in the
full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when
he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal
emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling
freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him
--a momentary Adam--the world is newly
created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in the
similitude of a three-pound trout.
In the country, then, it is well enough occa-
sionally to dress by candle-light and assist at the
ceremony of dawn; it is well if for no other
purpose than to disarm the intolerance of the
professional early riser who, were he in a state
of perfect health, would not be the wandering
victim of insomnia, and boast of it. There are
few small things more exasperating than this
early bird with the worm of his conceit in his
bill.
UN POETE MANQUE
IN the first volume of Miss Dickinson's poet-
ical melange is a little poem which needs
only a slight revision of the initial stanza to
entitle it to rank with some of the swallow-
flights in Heine's lyrical intermezzo. I have ten-
tatively tucked a rhyme into that opening stanza:
I taste a liquor never brewed
In vats upon the Rhine;
No tankard ever held a draught
Of alcohol like mine.
Inebriate of air am I,
And debauchee of dew,
Reeling, through endless summer days,
From inns of molten blue.
When landlords turn the drunken bee
Out of the Foxglove's door,
When butterflies renounce their drams,
I shall but drink the more!
Till seraphs swing their snowy caps
And saints to windows run,
To see the little tippler
Leaning against the sun!
Those inns of molten blue, and the disreputable
honey-gatherer who gets himself turned out-of-
doors at the sign of the Foxglove, are very
taking matters. I know of more important
things that interest me vastly less. This is one
of the ten or twelve brief pieces so nearly per-
fect in structure as almost to warrant the reader
in suspecting that Miss Dickinson's general dis-
regard of form was a deliberate affectation. The
artistic finish of the following sunset-piece
makes her usual quatrains unforgivable:
This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery!
Night after night her purple traffic
Strews the landing with opal bales;
Merchantmen poise upon horizons,
Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.
The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere
of a Claude Lorraine. One instantly frames it
in one's memory. Several such bits of impres-
sionist landscape may be found in the portfolio.
It is to be said, in passing, that there are few
things in Miss Dickinson's poetry so felicitous
as Mr. Higginson's characterization of it in his
preface to the volume: "In many cases these
verses will seem to the reader <i>like poetry
pulled up by the roots</i>, with rain and dew and
earth clinging to them." Possibly it might be
objected that this is not the best way to gather
either flowers or poetry.
Miss Dickinson possessed an extremely un-
conventional and bizarre mind. She was deeply
tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly
influenced by the mannerism of Emerson. The
very gesture with which she tied her bonnet-
strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like
walks in her garden at Amherst, must
have had something dreamy and Emersonian
in it. She had much fancy of a quaint kind,
but only, as it appears to me, intermittent
flashes of imagination.
That Miss Dickinson's memoranda have a cer-
tain something which, for want of a more pre-
cise name, we term <i>quality</i>, is not to be denied.
But the incoherence and shapelessness of the
greater part of her verse are fatal. On nearly
every page one lights upon an unsupported
exquisite line or a lonely happy epithet; but a
single happy epithet or an isolated exquisite line
does not constitute a poem. What Lowell says
of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss
Dickinson: "Donne is full of salient verses
that would take the rudest March winds of
criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first
tease us like charades and then delight us with
the felicity of their solution; but these have not
saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the
formless and the fragmentary."
Touching this question of mere technique Mr.
Ruskin has a word to say (it appears that he
said it "in his earlier and better days"), and
Mr. Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor
mass, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one
grain or fragment of thought." This is a pro-
position to which one would cordially subscribe
if it were not so intemperately stated. A sug-
gestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive
dictum is furnished by his own volume of verse.
The substance of it is weighty enough, but the
workmanship lacks just that touch which dis-
tinguishes the artist from the bungler--the
touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when writing
prose, appears not much to have regarded either
in his later or "in his earlier and better days."
Miss Dickinson's stanzas, with their impos-
sible rhyme, their involved significance, their
interrupted flute-note of birds that have no con-
tinuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a
group of eager listeners. A shy New England
bluebird, shifting its light load of song, has for
the moment been mistaken for a stray nightingale.
THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD
I WENT to see a play the other night, one of
those good old-fashioned English comedies
that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen.
The piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its
archaic stiffness, and obsolete code of morals,
was devoid of interest excepting as a collection
of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it
through. The one thing in it that held me a
pleased spectator was the graceful costume of a
certain player who looked like a fine old por-
trait--by Vandyke or Velasquez, let us say--
that had come to life and kicked off its tar-
nished frame.
I do not know at what epoch of the world's
history the scene of the play was laid; possibly
the author originally knew, but it was evident
that the actors did not, for their make-ups re-
presented quite antagonistic periods. This cir-
cumstance, however, detracted only slightly from
the special pleasure I took in the young person
called Delorme. He was not in himself inter-
esting; he was like that Major Waters in
"Pepys's Diary"--"a most amorous melan-
choly gentleman who is under a despayr in love,
which makes him bad company;" it was en-
tirely Delorme's dress.
I never saw mortal man in a dress more sen-
sible and becoming. The material was accord-
ing to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of
some dark cherry-colored stuff with trimmings
of a deeper shade. My idea of a doublet is so
misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the
gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat
of some description hanging negligently from
the shoulders and looped at the throat, showing
a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at
the wrists. Full trousers reaching to the tops of
buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft hat--
not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque
shapeless head-gear, one side jauntily fastened
up with a jewel--completed the essential por-
tions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to
walk in, to ride in, to sit in. The wearer of it
could not be awkward if he tried, and I will do
Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress
to some severe tests. But he was graceful all
the while, and made me wish that my country-
men would throw aside their present hideous
habiliments and hasten to the measuring-room
of Delorme's tailor.
In looking over the plates of an old book of
fashions we smile at the monstrous attire in
which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to
deck themselves. Presently it will be the turn
of posterity to smile at us, for in our own way
we are no less ridiculous than were our ances-
tors in their knee-breeches, pig-tail and <i>chapeau
de bras</i>. In fact we are really more absurd. If
a fashionably dressed man of to-day could catch
a single glimpse of himself through the eyes of
his descendants four or five generations re-
moved, he would have a strong impression of
being something that had escaped from some-
where.
Whatever strides we may have made in arts
and sciences, we have made no advance in the
matter of costume. That Americans do not
tattoo themselves, and do go fully clad--I am
speaking exclusively of my own sex--is about
all that can be said in favor of our present
fashions. I wish I had the vocabulary of Herr
Teufelsdrockh with which to inveigh against
the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angu-
lar swallow-tailed coat that makes a man look
like a poor species of bird and gets him mis-
taken for the waiter. "As long as a man wears
the modern coat," says Leigh Hunt, "he has no
right to despise any dress. What snips at the
collar and lapels! What a mechanical and ridic-
ulous cut about the flaps! What buttons in front
that are never meant to button, and yet are no
ornament! And what an exquisitely absurd pair
of buttons at the back! gravely regarded, never-
theless, and thought as indispensably necessary
to every well-conditioned coat, as other bits of
metal or bone are to the bodies of savages whom
we laugh at. There is absolutely not one iota of
sense, grace, or even economy in the modern
coat."
Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of
the period. That a Christian can go about un-
abashed with a shiny black cylinder on his head
shows what civilization has done for us in the
way of taste in personal decoration. The scalp-
lock of an Apache brave has more style. When
an Indian squaw comes into a frontier settle-
ment the first "marked-down" article she pur-
chases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct
as to the eternal fitness of things tells her that
its proper place is on the skull of a barbarian.
It was while revolving these pleasing reflec-
tions in my mind, that our friend Delorme
walked across the stage in the fourth act, and
though there was nothing in the situation nor in
the text of the play to warrant it, I broke into
tremendous applause, from which I desisted
only at the scowl of an usher--an object in a
celluloid collar and a claw-hammer coat. My
solitary ovation to Master Delorme was an in-
voluntary and, I think, pardonable protest against
the male costume of our own time.
ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION
EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is
the age of vain fantasy, there is no ac-
counting for the fact that young men and young
women of poetical temperament should so fre-
quently assume to look upon an early demise
for themselves as the most desirable thing in
the world. Though one may incidentally be
tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one
cannot help wondering. That persons who are
exceptionally fortunate in their environment, and
in private do not pretend to be otherwise, should
openly announce their intention of retiring at
once into the family tomb, is a problem not
easily solved. The public has so long listened
to these funereal solos that if a few of the poets
thus impatient to be gone were to go, their de-
parture would perhaps be attended by that re-
signed speeding which the proverb invokes on
behalf of the parting guest.
The existence of at least one magazine editor
would, I know, have a shadow lifted from it.
At this writing, in a small mortuary basket
under his desk are seven or eight poems of so
gloomy a nature that he would not be able to
remain in the same room with them if he did
not suspect the integrity of their pessimism.
The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable
than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated
sorrow.
The Miss Gladys who sends a poem entitled
"Forsaken," in which she addresses death as her
only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes.
He sees, among other dissolving views, a little
hoyden in magnificent spirits, perhaps one of
this season's social buds, with half a score of
lovers ready to pluck her from the family stem
--a rose whose countless petals are coupons. A
caramel has disagreed with her, or she would
not have written in this despondent vein. The
young man who seeks to inform the world in
eleven anaemic stanzas of <i>terze rime</i> that the
cup of happiness has been forever dashed from
his lip (he appears to have but one) and darkly
intimates that the end is "nigh" (rhyming af-
fably with "sigh"), will probably be engaged
a quarter of a century from now in making simi-
lar declarations. He is simply echoing some
dysthymic poet of the past--reaching out with
some other man's hat for the stray nickel of your
sympathy.
This morbidness seldom accompanies gen-
uine poetic gifts. The case of David Gray, the
young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an in-
stance to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly
sad, and the failure of health just as he was on
the verge of achieving something like success
justified his profound melancholy; but that he
tuned this melancholy and played upon it, as if
it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in
one of his sonnets.
In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's)
"Life and Letters of John Keats" it is related
that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood
upon his lips after coughing, said to his friend
Charles Brown: "I know the color of that blood;
it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That
drop is my death-warrant. I must die." Who
that ever read the passage could forget it? David
Gray did not, for he versified the incident as
happening to himself and appropriated, as his
own, Keats's comment:
Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain,
There came arterial blood, and with a sigh
Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein,
That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.
The incident was likely enough a personal
experience, but the comment should have been
placed in quotation marks. I know of few
stranger things in literature than this poet's
dramatization of another man's pathos. Even
Keats's epitaph--<i>Here lies one whose name</i>
<i>was writ in water</i>--finds an echo in David Gray's
<i>Below lies one whose name was traced in sand</i>.
Poor Gray was at least the better prophet.
WISHMAKERS' TOWN
A LIMITED edition of this little volume
of verse, which seems to me in many re-
spects unique, was issued in 1885, and has long
been out of print. The reissue of the book is
in response to the desire off certain readers who
have not forgotten the charm which William
Young's poem exercised upon them years ago,
and, finding the charm still potent, would have
others share it.
The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem
and not simply a series of unrelated lyrics, is in-
genious and original, and unfolds itself in mea-
sures at once strong and delicate. The mood of
the poet and the method of the playwright are
obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town--a
little town situated in the no-man's-land of "The
Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
--is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the
dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls
the townfolk to their various avocations, the
toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness, the
miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque se-
quence the personages of the Masque pass be-
fore us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers,
gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd
the scene, and have in turn their word of poign-
ant speech. We mingle with the throng in the
streets; we hear the whir of looms and the din
of foundries, the blare of trumpets, the whisper
of lovers, the scandals of the market-place, and,
in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy
microcosm. A contracted stage, indeed, yet
large enough for the play of many passions, as
the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the
sounding of the curfew, the town is hushed to
sleep again, and the curtain falls on this mimic
drama of life.
The charm of it all is not easily to be defined.
Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were
broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs
an atmosphere too evasive for measurement--an
atmosphere that stipulates an imaginative mood
on the part of the reader. The quality which
pleases in certain of the lyrical episodes is less
intangible. One readily explains one's liking
for so gracious a lyric as The Flower-Seller, to
select an example at random. Next to the plea-
sure that lies in the writing of such exquisite
verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the
stanzas partly for my own gratification, and
partly to win the reader to "Wishmakers'
Town," not knowing better how to do it.
Myrtle, and eglantine,
For the old love and the new!
And the columbine,
With its cap and bells, for folly!
And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth! and the rue,
For melancholy!
But of all the blossoms that blow,
Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may,
This gentle guest,
Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray,
Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low
Upon her breast.
For the orange flower
Ye may buy as ye will: but the violet of the wood
Is the love of maidenhood;
And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour,
He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream,
No, never again shall he meet with a dower that shall seem
So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years,
At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath,
The past shall arise,
And his eyes shall be dim with tears,
And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise
Though he stand in the Shambles of death.
In a different tone, but displaying the same
sureness of execution, is the cry of the lowly
folk, the wretched pawns in the great game of
life:
Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame,
Plot, and plunder, and disagree!
O but the game is a royal game!
O but your tourneys are fair to see!
None too hopeful we found our lives;
Sore was labor from day to day;
Still we strove for our babes and wives--
Now, to the trumpet, we march away!
"Why?"--For some one hath will'd it so!
Nothing we know of the why or the where--
To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow--
Nothing we know, and little we care.
Give us to kill!--since this is the end
Of love and labor in Nature's plan;
Give us to kill and ravish and rend,
Yea, since this is the end of man.
States shall perish, and states be born:
Leaders, out of the throng, shall press;
Some to honor, and some to scorn:
We, that are little, shall yet be less.
Over our lines shall the vultures soar;
Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry;
And the dead shall be as the sands of the shore;
And daily the living shall pray to die.
Nay, what matter!--When all is said,
Prince and Bishop will plunder still:
Lord and Lady must dance and wed.
Pity us, pray for us, ye that will!
It is only the fear of impinging on Mr.
Young's copyright that prevents me reprinting
the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the
prologue of The Strollers, which reads like a page
from the prelude to some Old-World miracle
play. The setting of these things is frequently
antique, but the thought is the thought of to-
day. I think there is a new generation of
readers for such poetry as Mr. Young's. I ven-
ture the prophecy that it will not lack for them
later when the time comes for the inevitable
rearrangement of present poetic values.
The author of "Wishmakers' Town" is the
child of his period, and has not escaped the <i>ma-
ladie du siecle</i>. The doubt and pessimism that
marked the end of the nineteenth century find a
voice in the bell-like strophes with which the
volume closes. It is the dramatist rather than
the poet who speaks here. The real message of
the poet to mankind is ever one of hope. Amid
the problems that perplex and discourage, it is
for him to sing
Of what the world shall be
When the years have died away.
HISTORICAL NOVELS
IN default of such an admirable piece of work
as Dr. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne," I
like best those fictions which deal with king-
doms and principalities that exist only in the
mind's eye. One's knowledge of actual events
and real personages runs no serious risk of re-
ceiving shocks in this no-man's-land. Everything
that happens in an imaginary realm--in the
realm of Ruritania, for illustration--has an air
of possibility, at least a shadowy vraisemblance.
The atmosphere and local color, having an au-
thenticity of their own, are not to be challenged.
You cannot charge the writer with ignorance of
the period in which his narrative is laid, since
the period is as vague as the geography. He
walks on safe ground, eluding many of the perils
that beset the story-teller who ventures to stray
beyond the bounds of the make-believe. One
peril he cannot escape--that of misrepresenting
human nature.
The anachronisms of the average historical
novel, pretending to reflect history, are among
its minor defects. It is a thing altogether won-
derfully and fearfully made--the imbecile in-
trigue, the cast-iron characters, the plumed and
armored dialogue with its lance of gory rheto-
ric forever at charge. The stage at its worst
moments is not so unreal. Here art has broken
into smithereens the mirror which she is sup-
posed to hold up to nature.
In this romance-world somebody is always
somebody's unsuspected father, mother, or child,
deceiving every one excepting the reader. Usu-
ally the anonymous person is the hero, to whom
it is mere recreation to hold twenty swordsmen
at bay on a staircase, killing ten or twelve of
them before he escapes through a door that ever
providentially opens directly behind him. How
tired one gets of that door! The "caitiff" in
these chronicles of when knighthood was in
flower is invariably hanged from "the highest
battlement"--the second highest would not do
at all; or else he is thrown into "the deepest
dungeon of the castle"--the second deepest
dungeon was never known to be used on these
occasions. The hero habitually "cleaves" his
foeman "to the midriff," the "midriff" being
what the properly brought up hero always has
in view. A certain fictional historian of my
acquaintance makes his swashbuckler exclaim:
"My sword will [shall] kiss his midriff;" but
that is an exceptionally lofty flight of diction.
My friend's heroine dresses as a page, and in
the course of long interviews with her lover re-
mains unrecognized--a diaphanous literary in-
vention that must have been old when the Pyra-
mids were young. The heroine's small brother,
with playful archaicism called "a springald,"
puts on her skirts and things and passes him-
self off for his sister or anybody else he pleases.
In brief, there is no puerility that is not at home
in this sphere of misbegotten effort. Listen--
a priest, a princess, and a young man in woman's
clothes are on the scene:
The princess rose to her feet and
approached the priest.
"Father," she said swiftly, "this
is not the Lady Joan, my brother's
wife, but a youth marvelously like
her, who hath offered himself in
her place that she might escape. . . .
He is the Count von Loen, a lord
of Kernsburg. And I love him. We
want you to marry us now, dear
Father--now, without a moment's
delay; for if you do not they will
kill him, and I shall have to marry
Prince Wasp!"
This is from "Joan of the Sword Hand," and
if ever I read a more silly performance I have
forgotten it.
POOR YORICK
THERE is extant in the city of New York
an odd piece of bric-a-brac which I am
sometimes tempted to wish was in my own
possession. On a bracket in Edwin Booth's
bedroom at The Players--the apartment re-
mains as he left it that solemn June day ten
years ago--stands a sadly dilapidated skull
which the elder Booth, and afterward his son
Edwin, used to soliloquize over in the grave-
yard at Elsinore in the fifth act of "Hamlet."
A skull is an object that always invokes
interest more or less poignant; it always
has its pathetic story, whether told or untold;
but this skull is especially a skull "with a
past."
In the early forties, while playing an engage-
ment somewhere in the wild West, Junius
Brutus Booth did a series of kindnesses to a
particularly undeserving fellow, the name of
him unknown to us. The man, as it seemed,
was a combination of gambler, horse-stealer,
and highwayman--in brief, a miscellaneous
desperado, and precisely the melodramatic sort
of person likely to touch the sympathies of the
half-mad player. In the course of nature or the
law, presumably the law, the adventurer bodily
disappeared one day, and soon ceased to exist
even as a reminiscence in the florid mind of his
sometime benefactor.
As the elder Booth was seated at breakfast
one morning in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky,
a negro boy entered the room bearing a small
osier basket neatly covered with a snowy nap-
kin. It had the general appearance of a basket
of fruit or flowers sent by some admirer, and as
such it figured for a moment in Mr. Booth's
conjecture. On lifting the cloth the actor started
from the chair with a genuine expression on his
features of that terror which he was used so
marvelously to simulate as Richard III. in the
midnight tent-scene or as Macbeth when the
ghost of Banquo usurped his seat at table.
In the pretty willow-woven basket lay the
head of Booth's old pensioner, which head the
old pensioner had bequeathed in due legal form
to the tragedian, begging him henceforth to
adopt it as one of the necessary stage properties
in the fifth act of Mr. Shakespeare's tragedy
of "Hamlet.'' "Take it away, you black
imp!" thundered the actor to the equally aghast
negro boy, whose curiosity had happily not
prompted him to investigate the dark nature of
his burden.
Shortly afterward, however, the horse-stealer's
residuary legatee, recovering from the first shock
of his surprise, fell into the grim humor of the
situation, and proceeded to carry out to the
letter the testator's whimsical request. Thus it
was that the skull came to secure an engage-
ment to play the role of poor Yorick in J. B.
Booth's company of strolling players, and to
continue a while longer to glimmer behind the
footlights in the hands of his famous son.
Observing that the grave-digger in his too
eager realism was damaging the thing--the
marks of his pick and spade are visible on the
cranium--Edwin Booth presently replaced it
with a papier-mache counterfeit manufactured
in the property-room of the theatre. During
his subsequent wanderings in Australia and
California, he carefully preserved the relic,
which finally found repose on the bracket in
question.
How often have I sat, of an afternoon, in
that front room on the fourth floor of the club-
house in Gramercy Park, watching the winter
or summer twilight gradually softening and
blurring the sharp outline of the skull until it
vanished uncannily into the gloom! Edwin
Booth had forgotten, if ever he knew, the name
of the man; but I had no need of it in order to
establish acquaintance with poor Yorick. In
this association I was conscious of a deep tinge
of sentiment on my own part, a circumstance
not without its queerness, considering how very
distant the acquaintance really was.
Possibly he was a fellow of infinite jest in his
day; he was sober enough now, and in no way
disposed to indulge in those flashes of merri-
ment "that were wont to set the table on a
roar." But I did not regret his evaporated
hilarity; I liked his more befitting genial si-
lence, and had learned to look upon his rather
open countenance with the same friendliness as
that with which I regarded the faces of less
phantasmal members of the club. He had be-
come to me a dramatic personality as distinct as
that of any of the Thespians I met in the grill-
room or the library.
Yorick's feeling in regard to me was a sub-
ject upon which I frequently speculated. There
was at intervals an alert gleam of intelligence
in those cavernous eye-sockets, as if the sudden
remembrance of some old experience had illu-
mined them. He had been a great traveler, and
had known strange vicissitudes in life; his stage
career had brought him into contact with a
varied assortment of men and women, and ex-
tended his horizon. His more peaceful profes-
sion of holding up mail-coaches on lonely roads
had surely not been without incident. It was
inconceivable that all this had left no impres-
sions. He must have had at least a faint recol-
lection of the tempestuous Junius Brutus Booth.
That Yorick had formed his estimate of me, and
probably not a flattering one, is something of
which I am strongly convinced.
At the death of Edwin Booth, poor Yorick
passed out of my personal cognizance, and now
lingers an incongruous shadow amid the mem-
ories of the precious things I lost then.
The suite of apartments formerly occupied by
Edwin Booth at The Players has been, as I have
said, kept unchanged--a shrine to which from
time to time some loving heart makes silent
pilgrimage. On a table in the centre of his
bedroom lies the book just where he laid it
down, an ivory paper-cutter marking the page
his eyes last rested upon; and in this chamber,
with its familiar pictures, pipes, and ornaments,
the skull finds its proper sanctuary. If at odd
moments I wish that by chance poor Yorick
had fallen to my care, the wish is only half-
hearted, though had that happened, I would
have given him welcome to the choicest corner
in my study and tenderly cherished him for the
sake of one who comes no more.
THE AUTOGRAPH HUNTER
One that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!--<i>King Lear.</i>
THE material for this paper on the auto-
graph hunter, his ways and his manners,
has been drawn chiefly from experiences not
my own. My personal relations with him have
been comparatively restricted, a circumstance
to which I owe the privilege of treating the
subject with a freedom that might otherwise not
seem becoming.
No author is insensible to the compliment in-
volved in a request for his autograph, assuming
the request to come from some sincere lover of
books and bookmen. It is an affair of different
complection when he is importuned to give time
and attention to the innumerable unknown who
"collect" autographs as they would collect post-
age stamps, with no interest in the matter be-
yond the desire to accumulate as many as possi-
ble. The average autograph hunter, with his
purposeless insistence, reminds one of the queen
in Stockton's story whose fad was "the button-
holes of all nations."
In our population of eighty millions and up-
ward there are probably two hundred thousand
persons interested more or less in what is termed
the literary world. This estimate is absurdly
low, but it serves to cast a sufficient side-light
upon the situation. Now, any unit of these two
hundred thousand is likely at any moment to in-
dite a letter to some favorite novelist, historian,
poet, or what not. It will be seen, then, that
the autograph hunter is no inconsiderable per-
son. He has made it embarrassing work for the
author fortunate or unfortunate enough to be re-
garded as worth while. Every mail adds to his
reproachful pile of unanswered letters. If he
have a conscience, and no amanuensis, he quickly
finds himself tangled in the meshes of endless
and futile correspondence. Through policy,
good nature, or vanity he is apt to become facile
prey.
A certain literary collector once confessed in
print that he always studied the idiosyncrasies
of his "subject" as carefully as another sort of
collector studies the plan of the house to which
he meditates a midnight visit. We were as-
sured that with skillful preparation and adroit
approach an autograph could be extracted from
anybody. According to the revelations of the
writer, Bismarck, Queen Victoria, and Mr.
Gladstone had their respective point of easy
access--their one unfastened door or window,
metaphorically speaking. The strongest man
has his weak side.
Dr. Holmes's affability in replying to every
one who wrote to him was perhaps not a trait
characteristic of the elder group. Mr. Lowell,
for instance, was harder-hearted and rather diffi-
cult to reach. I recall one day in the library at
Elmwood. As I was taking down a volume
from the shelf a sealed letter escaped from the
pages and fluttered to my feet. I handed it to
Mr. Lowell, who glanced incuriously at the
superscription. "Oh, yes," he said, smiling,
"I know 'em by instinct." Relieved of its en-
velope, the missive turned out to be eighteen
months old, and began with the usual amusing
solecism: "As one of the most famous of
American authors I would like to possess your
autograph."
Each recipient of such requests has of course
his own way of responding. Mr. Whittier used
to be obliging; Mr. Longfellow politic; Mr.
Emerson, always philosophical, dreamily con-
fiscated the postage stamps.
Time was when the collector contented him-
self with a signature on a card; but that, I am
told, no longer satisfies. He must have a letter
addressed to him personally--"on any subject
you please," as an immature scribe lately sug-
gested to an acquaintance of mine. The in-
genuous youth purposed to flourish a letter in the
faces of his less fortunate competitors, in order
to show them that he was on familiar terms with
the celebrated So-and-So. This or a kindred
motive is the spur to many a collector. The
stratagems he employs to compass his end are
inexhaustible. He drops you an off-hand note
to inquire in what year you first published your
beautiful poem entitled "A Psalm of Life." If
you are a simple soul, you hasten to assure him
that you are not the author of that poem, which
he must have confused with your "Rime of the
Ancient Mariner"--and there you are. Another
expedient is to ask if your father's middle name
was not Hierophilus. Now, your father has
probably been dead many years, and as perhaps
he was not a public man in his day, you are
naturally touched that any one should have in-
terest in him after this long flight of time. In
the innocence of your heart you reply by the
next mail that your father's middle name was
not Hierophilus, but Epaminondas--and there
you are again. It is humiliating to be caught
swinging, like a simian ancestor, on a branch
of one's genealogical tree.
Some morning you find beside your plate at
breakfast an imposing parchment with a great
gold seal in the upper left-hand corner. This
document--I am relating an actual occurrence
--announces with a flourish that you have unan-
imously been elected an honorary member of
The Kalamazoo International Literary Associa-
tion. Possibly the honor does not take away
your respiration; but you are bound by courtesy
to make an acknowledgment, and you express
your insincere thanks to the obliging secretary
of a literary organization which does not exist
anywhere on earth.
A scheme of lighter creative touch is that of
the correspondent who advises you that he is
replenishing his library and desires a detailed
list of your works, with the respective dates of
their first issue, price, style of binding, etc. A
bibliophile, you say to yourself. These inter-
rogations should of course have been addressed
to your publisher; but they are addressed to
you, with the stereotyped "thanks in advance."
The natural inference is that the correspondent,
who writes in a brisk commercial vein, wishes
to fill out his collection of your books, or, pos-
sibly, to treat himself to a complete set in full
crushed Levant. Eight or ten months later this
individual, having forgotten (or hoping you
will not remember) that he has already de-
manded a chronological list of your writings,
forwards another application couched in the
self-same words. The length of time it takes
him to "replenish" his library (with your
books) strikes you as pathetic. You cannot
control your emotions sufficiently to pen a
reply. From a purely literary point of view
this gentleman cares nothing whatever for your
holograph; from a mercantile point of view
he cares greatly and likes to obtain duplicate
specimens, which he disposes of to dealers in
such frail merchandise.
The pseudo-journalist who is engaged in
preparing a critical and biographical sketch of
you, and wants to incorporate, if possible, some
slight hitherto unnoted event in your life--a
signed photograph and a copy of your book-
plate are here in order--is also a character
which periodically appears upon the scene. In
this little Comedy of Deceptions there are as
many players as men have fancies.
A brother slave-of-the-lamp permits me to
transfer this leaf from the book of his experi-
ence: "Not long ago the postman brought me
a letter of a rather touching kind. The unknown
writer, lately a widow, and plainly a woman of
refinement, had just suffered a new affliction in
the loss of her little girl. My correspondent
asked me to copy for her ten or a dozen lines
from a poem which I had written years before
on the death of a child. The request was so
shrinkingly put, with such an appealing air of
doubt as to its being heeded, that I immediately
transcribed the entire poem, a matter of a hun-
dred lines or so, and sent it to her. I am unable
to this day to decide whether I was wholly hurt
or wholly amused when, two months afterward,
I stumbled over my manuscript, with a neat
price attached to it, in a second-hand book-
shop."
Perhaps the most distressing feature of the
whole business is the very poor health which
seems to prevail among autograph hunters. No
other class of persons in the community shows
so large a percentage of confirmed invalids.
There certainly is some mysterious connection
between incipient spinal trouble and the col-
lecting of autographs. Which superinduces the
other is a question for pathology. It is a fact
that one out of every eight applicants for a
specimen of penmanship bases his or her claim
upon the possession of some vertebral disability
which leaves him or her incapable of doing
anything but write to authors for their auto-
graph. Why this particular diversion should be
the sole resource remains undisclosed. But so
it appears to be, and the appeal to one's sympa-
thy is most direct and persuasive. Personally,
however, I have my suspicions, suspicions that
are shared by several men of letters, who have
come to regard this plea of invalidism, in the
majority of cases, as simply the variation of a
very old and familiar tune. I firmly believe
that the health of autograph hunters, as a class,
is excellent.
ROBERT HERRICK
I
A LITTLE over three hundred years ago
England had given to her a poet of the
very rarest lyrical quality, but she did not dis-
cover the fact for more than a hundred and
fifty years afterward. The poet himself was
aware of the fact at once, and stated it, perhaps
not too modestly, in countless quatrains and
couplets, which were not read, or, if read, were
not much regarded at the moment. It has al-
ways been an incredulous world in this matter.
So many poets have announced their arrival,
and not arrived!
Robert Herrick was descended in a direct
line from an ancient family in Lincolnshire, the
Eyricks, a mentionable representative of which
was John Eyrick of Leicester, the poet's grand-
father, admitted freeman in 1535, and afterward
twice made mayor of the town. John Eyrick
or Heyricke--he spelled his name recklessly--
had five sons, the second of which sought a
career in London, where he became a gold-
smith, and in December, 1582, married Julian
Stone, spinster, of Bedfordshire, a sister to
Anne, Lady Soame, the wife of Sir Stephen
Soame. One of the many children of this mar-
riage was Robert Herrick.
It is the common misfortune of the poet's
biographers, though it was the poet's own great
good fortune, that the personal interviewer was
an unknown quantity at the period when Her-
rick played his part on the stage of life. Of
that performance, in its intimate aspects, we
have only the slightest record.
Robert Herrick was born in Wood street,
Cheapside, London, in 1591, and baptized at
St. Vedast's, Foster Lane, on August 24 of that
year. He had several brothers and sisters, with
whom we shall not concern ourselves. It would
be idle to add the little we know about these
persons to the little we know about Herrick
himself. He is a sufficient problem without
dragging in the rest of the family.
When the future lyrist was fifteen months old
his father, Nicholas Herrick, made his will,
and immediately fell out of an upper win-
dow. Whether or not this fall was an intended
sequence to the will, the high almoner, Dr.
Fletcher, Bishop of Bristol, promptly put in
his claim to the estate, "all goods and chattels
of suicides" becoming his by law. The cir-
cumstances were suspicious, though not conclu-
sive, and the good bishop, after long litigation,
consented to refer the case to arbitrators, who
awarded him two hundred and twenty pounds,
thus leaving the question at issue--whether or
not Herrick's death had been his own premedi-
tated act--still wrapped in its original mystery.
This singular law, which had the possible effect
of inducing high almoners to encourage suicide
among well-to-do persons of the lower and
middle classes, was afterward rescinded.
Nicholas Herrick did not leave his household
destitute, for his estate amounted to five thousand
pounds, that is to say, twenty-five thousand
pounds in to-day's money; but there were many
mouths to feed. The poet's two uncles, Robert
Herrick and William Herrick of Beaumanor,
the latter subsequently knighted <1> for his useful-
ness as jeweller and money-lender to James I.,
were appointed guardians to the children.
Young Robert appears to have attended school
in Westminster until his fifteenth year, when
he was apprenticed to Sir William, who had
learned the gentle art of goldsmith from his
nephew's father. Though Robert's indentures
<1> Dr. Grosart, in his interesting and valuable Memorial-Intro-
duction to Herrick's poems, quotes this curious item from Win-
wood's <i>Manorials of Affairs of State</i>: "On Easter Tuesday [1605],
one Mr. William Herrick, a goldsmith in Cheapside, was Knighted
for making a Hole in the great Diamond the King cloth wear. The
party little expected the honour, but he did his work so well as
won the King to an extraordinary liking of it."
bound him for ten years, Sir William is sup-
posed to have offered no remonstrance when he
was asked, long before that term expired, to
cancel the engagement and allow Robert to enter
Cambridge, which he did as fellow-commoner
at St. John's College. At the end of two years
he transferred himself to Trinity Hall, with a
view to economy and the pursuit of the law--
the two frequently go together. He received
his degree of B. A. in 1617, and his M. A. in
1620, having relinquished the law for the arts.
During this time he was assumed to be in
receipt of a quarterly allowance of ten pounds--
a not illiberal provision, the pound being then
five times its present value; but as the payments
were eccentric, the master of arts was in recur-
rent distress. If this money came from his own
share of his father's estate, as seems likely,
Herrick had cause for complaint; if otherwise,
the pith is taken out of his grievance.
The Iliad of his financial woes at this juncture
is told in a few chance-preserved letters written
to his "most careful uncle," as he calls that
evidently thrifty person. In one of these mono-
tonous and dreary epistles, which are signed
"R. Hearick," the writer says: "The essence
of my writing is (as heretofore) to entreat
you to paye for my use to Mr. Arthour Johnson,
bookseller, in Paule's Churchyarde, the ordi-
narie sume of tenn pounds, and that with as
much sceleritie as you maye." He also indulges
in the natural wish that his college bills "had
leaden wings and tortice feet." This was in
1617. The young man's patrimony, whatever
it may have been, had dwindled, and he con-
fesses to "many a throe and pinches of the
purse." For the moment, at least, his prospects
were not flattering.
Robert Herrick's means of livelihood, when
in 1620 he quitted the university and went up to
London, are conjectural. It is clear that he was
not without some resources, since he did not
starve to death on his wits before he discovered
a patron in the Earl of Pembroke. In the court
circle Herrick also unearthed humbler, but per-
haps not less useful, allies in the persons of
Edward Norgate, clerk of the signet, and Master
John Crofts, cup-bearer to the king. Through
the two New Year anthems, honored by the
music of Henry Lawes, his Majesty's organist
at Westminster, it is more than possible that
Herrick was brought to the personal notice of
Charles and Henrietta Maria. All this was a
promise of success, but not success itself. It
has been thought probable that Herrick may
have secured some minor office in the chapel
at Whitehall. That would accord with his sub-
sequent appointment (September, 1627,) as
chaplain to the Duke of Buckingham's unfortu-
nate expedition of the Isle of Rhe.
Precisely when Herrick was invested with
holy orders is not ascertainable. If one may
draw an inference from his poems, the life he
led meanwhile was not such as his "most care-
ful uncle" would have warmly approved. The
literary clubs and coffee-houses of the day were
open to a free-lance like young Herrick, some
of whose blithe measures, passing in manuscript
from hand to hand, had brought him faintly to
light as a poet. The Dog and the Triple Tun
were not places devoted to worship, unless it
were to the worship of "rare Ben Jonson," at
whose feet Herrick now sat, with the other
blossoming young poets of the season. He was
a faithful disciple to the end, and addressed
many loving lyrics to the master, of which not
the least graceful is His Prayer to Ben Jonson:
When I a verse shall make,
Know I have praid thee
For old religion's sake,
Saint Ben, to aide me.
Make the way smooth for me,
When I, thy Herrick,
Honouring thee, on my knee
Offer my lyric.
Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shalt be
Writ in my Psalter.
On September 30, 1629, Charles I., at the
recommending of the Earl of Exeter, presented
Herrick with the vicarage of Dean Prior, near
Totnes, in Devonshire. Here he was destined
to pass the next nineteen years of his life among
surroundings not congenial. For Herrick to be
a mile away from London stone was for Herrick
to be in exile. Even with railway and tele-
graphic interruptions from the outside world,
the dullness of a provincial English town of to-
day is something formidable. The dullness of a
sequestered English hamlet in the early part of
the seventeenth century must have been appall-
ing. One is dimly conscious of a belated throb
of sympathy for Robert Herrick. Yet, however
discontented or unhappy he may have been at
first in that lonely vicarage, the world may con-
gratulate itself on the circumstances that stranded
him there, far from the distractions of the town,
and with no other solace than his Muse, for there
it was he wrote the greater number of the poems
which were to make his fame. It is to this acci-
dental banishment to Devon that we owe the
cluster of exquisite pieces descriptive of obso-
lete rural manners and customs--the Christ-
mas masks, the Twelfth-night mummeries, the
morris-dances, and the May-day festivals.
The November following Herrick's appoint-
ment to the benefice was marked by the death
of his mother, who left him no heavier legacy
than "a ringe of twenty shillings." Perhaps
this was an understood arrangement between
them; but it is to be observed that, though Her-
rick was a spendthrift in epitaphs, he wasted no
funeral lines on Julian Herrick. In the matter
of verse he dealt generously with his family
down to the latest nephew. One of his most
charming and touching poems is entitled To
His Dying Brother, Master William Herrick,
a posthumous son. There appear to have been
two brothers named William. The younger,
who died early, is supposed to be referred to
here.
The story of Herrick's existence at Dean Prior
is as vague and bare of detail as the rest of the
narrative. His parochial duties must have been
irksome to him, and it is to be imagined that he
wore his cassock lightly. As a preparation for
ecclesiastical life he forswore sack and poetry;
but presently he was with the Muse again, and
his farewell to sack was in a strictly Pickwickian
sense. Herrick had probably accepted the vicar-
ship as he would have accepted a lieutenancy in
a troop of horse--with an eye to present emol-
ument and future promotion. The promotion
never came, and the emolument was nearly as
scant as that of Goldsmith's parson, who con-
sidered himself "passing rich with forty pounds
a year"--a height of optimism beyond the
reach of Herrick, with his expensive town wants
and habits. But fifty pounds--the salary of his
benefice--and possible perquisites in the way
of marriage and burial fees would enable him to
live for the time being. It was better than a
possible nothing a year in London.
Herrick's religious convictions were assuredly
not deeper than those of the average layman.
Various writers have taken a different view of
the subject; but it is inconceivable that a clergy-
man with a fitting sense of his function could
have written certain of the poems which Her-
rick afterward gave to the world--those aston-
ishing epigrams upon his rustic enemies, and
those habitual bridal compliments which, among
his personal friends, must have added a terror
to matrimony. Had he written only in that vein,
the posterity which he so often invoked with
pathetic confidence would not have greatly
troubled itself about him.
It cannot positively be asserted that all the
verses in question relate to the period of his in-
cumbency, for none of his verse is dated, with
the exception of the Dialogue betwixt Horace
and Lydia. The date of some of the composi-
tions may be arrived at by induction. The re-
ligious pieces grouped under the title of Noble
Numbers distinctly associate themselves with
Dean Prior, and have little other interest. Very
few of them are "born of the royal blood."
They lack the inspiration and magic of his secu-
lar poetry, and are frequently so fantastical and
grotesque as to stir a suspicion touching the ab-
solute soundness of Herrick's mind at all times.
The lines in which the Supreme Being is as-
sured that he may read Herrick's poems with-
out taking any tincture from their sinfulness
might have been written in a retreat for the un-
balanced. "For unconscious impiety," remarks
Mr. Edmund Gosse, <1> "this rivals the famous
passage in which Robert Montgomery exhorted
God to 'pause and think.'" Elsewhere, in an
apostrophe to "Heaven," Herrick says:
Let mercy be
So kind to set me free,
And I will straight
Come in, or force the gate.
In any event, the poet did not purpose to be
left out!
Relative to the inclusion of unworthy pieces
<1> In <i>Seventeenth-Century Studies</i>.
and the general absence of arrangement in the
"Hesperides," Dr. Grosart advances the theory
that the printers exercised arbitrary authority on
these points. Dr. Grosart assumes that Herrick
kept the epigrams and personal tributes in
manuscript books separate from the rest of the
work, which would have made a too slender
volume by itself, and on the plea of this slender-
ness was induced to trust the two collections
to the publisher, "whereupon he or some un-
skilled subordinate proceeded to intermix these
additions with the others. That the poet him-
self had nothing to do with the arrangement or
disarrangement lies on the surface." This is an
amiable supposition, but merely a supposition.
Herrick personally placed the "copy" in the
hands of John Williams and Francis Eglesfield,
and if he were over-persuaded to allow them
to print unfit verses, and to observe no method
whatever in the contents of the book, the dis-
credit is none the less his. It is charitable to
believe that Herrick's coarseness was not the
coarseness of the man, but of the time, and that
he followed the fashion <i>malgre lui</i>. With re-
gard to the fairy poems, they certainly should
have been given in sequence; but if there are
careless printers, there are also authors who are
careless in the arrangement of their manuscript,
a kind of task, moreover, in which Herrick was
wholly unpractised, and might easily have made
mistakes. The "Hesperides" was his sole
publication.
Herrick was now thirty-eight years of age.
Of his personal appearance at this time we have
no description. The portrait of him prefixed to
the original edition of his works belongs to a
much later moment. Whether or not the bovine
features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on
the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has
not laid its erasing finger on that singularly un-
pleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interest-
ing to note that this same Marshall engraved the
head of Milton for the first collection of his mis-
cellaneous poems--the precious 1645 volume
containing Il Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus, etc.
The plate gave great offense to the serious-
minded young Milton, not only because it re-
presented him as an elderly person, but because
of certain minute figures of peasant lads and
lassies who are very indistinctly seen dancing
frivolously under the trees in the background.
Herrick had more reason to protest. The ag-
gressive face bestowed upon him by the artist
lends a tone of veracity to the tradition that the
vicar occasionally hurled the manuscript of his
sermon at the heads of his drowsy parishioners,
accompanying the missive with pregnant re-
marks. He has the aspect of one meditating
assault and battery.
To offset the picture there is much indirect
testimony to the amiability of the man, aside
from the evidence furnished by his own writ-
ings. He exhibits a fine trait in the poem on the
Bishop of Lincoln's imprisonment--a poem full
of deference and tenderness for a person who
had evidently injured the writer, probably by
opposing him in some affair of church prefer-
ment. Anthony Wood says that Herrick "be-
came much beloved by the gentry in these parts
for his florid and witty (wise) discourses." It
appears that he was fond of animals, and had a
pet spaniel called Tracy, which did not get away
without a couplet attached to him:
Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see
For shape and service spaniell like to thee.
Among the exile's chance acquaintances was a
sparrow, whose elegy he also sings, comparing
the bird to Lesbia's sparrow, much to the latter's
disadvantage. All of Herrick's geese were swans.
On the authority of Dorothy King, the daughter
of a woman who served Herrick's successor at
Dean Prior in 1674, we are told that the poet
kept a pig, which he had taught to drink out of
a tankard--a kind of instruction he was admir-
ably qualified to impart. Dorothy was in her
ninety-ninth year when she communicated this
fact to Mr. Barron Field, the author of the
paper on Herrick published in the "Quarterly
Review" for August, 1810, and in the Boston
edition <1> of the "Hesperides" attributed to
Southey.
What else do we know of the vicar? A very
favorite theme with Herrick was Herrick. Scat-
tered through his book are no fewer than twenty-
five pieces entitled On Himself, not to men-
tion numberless autobiographical hints under
other captions. They are merely hints, throw-
ing casual side-lights on his likes and dislikes,
and illuminating his vanity. A whimsical per-
sonage without any very definite outlines might
be evolved from these fragments. I picture him
as a sort of Samuel Pepys, with perhaps less
quaintness, and the poetical temperament added.
Like the prince of gossips, too, he somehow
gets at your affections. In one place Herrick
<1> The Biographical Notice prefacing this volume of The British
Poets is a remarkable production, grammatically and chronologi-
cally. On page 7 the writer speaks of Herrick as living "in habits
of intimacy" with Ben Jonson in 1648. If that was the case, Her-
rick must have taken up his quarters in Westminster Abbey, for
Jonson had been dead eleven years.
laments the threatened failure of his eyesight
(quite in what would have been Pepys's man-
ner had Pepys written verse), and in another
place he tells us of the loss of a finger. The
quatrain treating of this latter catastrophe is as
fantastic as some of Dr. Donne's <i>concetti</i>:
One of the five straight branches of my hand
Is lopt already, and the rest but stand
Expecting when to fall, which soon will be:
First dies the leafe, the bough next, next the tree.
With all his great show of candor Herrick really
reveals as little of himself as ever poet did. One
thing, however, is manifest--he understood and
loved music. None but a lover could have said:
The mellow touch of musick most doth wound
The soule when it doth rather sigh than sound.
Or this to Julia:
So smooth, so sweet, so silvery is thy voice,
As could they hear, the damn'd would make no noise,
But listen to thee walking in thy chamber
Melting melodious words to lutes of amber.
. . . Then let me lye
Entranc'd, and lost confusedly;
And by thy musick stricken mute,
Die, and be turn'd into a lute.
Herrick never married. His modest Devon-
shire establishment was managed by a maid-
servant named Prudence Baldwin. "Fate likes
fine names," says Lowell. That of Herrick's
maid-of-all-work was certainly a happy meeting
of gentle vowels and consonants, and has had
the good fortune to be embalmed in the amber
of what may be called a joyous little threnody:
In this little urne is laid
Prewdence Baldwin, once my maid;
From whose happy spark here let
Spring the purple violet.
Herrick addressed a number of poems to her
before her death, which seems to have deeply
touched him in his loneliness. We shall not al-
low a pleasing illusion to be disturbed by the flip-
pancy of an old writer who says that "Prue was
but indifferently qualified to be a tenth muse."
She was a faithful handmaid, and had the merit
of causing Herrick in this octave to strike a note
of sincerity not usual with him:
These summer birds did with thy master stay
The times of warmth, but then they flew away,
Leaving their poet, being now grown old,
Expos'd to all the coming winter's cold.
But thou, kind Prew, didst with my fates abide
As well the winter's as the summer's tide:
For which thy love, live with thy master here
Not two, but all the seasons of the year.
Thus much have I done for thy memory, Mis-
tress Prew!
In spite of Herrick's disparagement of Dean-
bourn, which he calls "a rude river," and
his characterization of Devon folk as "a peo-
ple currish, churlish as the seas," the fullest
and pleasantest days of his life were prob-
ably spent at Dean Prior. He was not un-
mindful meanwhile of the gathering political
storm that was to shake England to its foun-
dations. How anxiously, in his solitude, he
watched the course of events, is attested by
many of his poems. This solitude was not
without its compensation. "I confess," he
says,
I ne'er invented such
Ennobled numbers for the presse
Than where I loath'd so much.
A man is never wholly unhappy when he is
writing verses. Herrick was firmly convinced
that each new lyric was a stone added to the
pillar of his fame, and perhaps his sense of
relief was tinged with indefinable regret when
he found himself suddenly deprived of his bene-
fice. The integrity of some of his royalistic
poems is doubtful; but he was not given the
benefit of the doubt by the Long Parliament,
which ejected the panegyrist of young Prince
Charles from the vicarage of Dean Prior, and
installed in his place the venerable John Syms,
a gentleman with pronounced Cromwellian
views.
Herrick metaphorically snapped his fingers
at the Puritans, discarded his clerical habili-
ments, and hastened to London to pick up such
as were left of the gay-colored threads of his
old experience there. Once more he would
drink sack at the Triple Tun, once more he
would breathe the air breathed by such poets
and wits as Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden,
and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and gin-
ger shall be hot I' the mouth too." In the
gladness of getting back "from the dull con-
fines of the drooping west," he writes a glow-
ing apostrophe to London--that "stony step-
mother to poets." He claims to be a free-born
Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen
again. According to his earlier biographers,
Herrick had much ado not to starve in that
same longed-for London, and fell into great
misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, arguing,
with justness, that Herrick's family, which was
wealthy and influential, would not have allowed
him to come to abject want. With his royal-
istic tendencies he may not have breathed quite
freely in the atmosphere of the Commonwealth,
and no doubt many tribulations fell to his lot,
but among them was not poverty.
The poet was now engaged in preparing his
works for the press, and a few weeks following
his return to London they were issued in a sin-
gle volume with the title "Hesperides; or, The
Works both Humane and Divine of Robert
Herrick, Esq."
The time was not ready for him. A new era
had dawned--the era of the commonplace.
The interval was come when Shakespeare him-
self was to lie in a kind of twilight. Herrick
was in spirit an Elizabethan, and had strayed
by chance into an artificial and prosaic age--
a sylvan singing creature alighting on an alien
planet. "He was too natural," says Mr. Pal-
grave in his Chrysomela, "too purely poetical;
he had not the learned polish, the political al-
lusion, the tone of the city, the didactic turn,
which were then and onward demanded from
poetry." Yet it is strange that a public which
had a relish for Edmund Waller should neglect
a poet who was fifty times finer than Waller
in his own specialty. What poet then, or in the
half-century that followed the Restoration, could
have written Corinna's Going a-Maying, or ap-
proached in kind the ineffable grace and perfec-
tion to be found in a score of Herrick's lyrics?
The "Hesperides" was received with chilling
indifference. None of Herrick's great contem-
poraries has left a consecrating word concerning
it. The book was not reprinted during the au-
thor's lifetime, and for more than a century after
his death Herrick was virtually unread. In 1796
the "Gentleman's Magazine" copied a few of
the poems, and two years later Dr. Nathan Drake
published in his "Literary Hours" three critical
papers on the poet, with specimens of his writ-
ings. Dr. Johnson omitted him from the "Lives
of the Poets," though space was found for half a
score of poetasters whose names are to be found
nowhere else. In 1810 Dr. Nott, a physician
of Bristol, issued a small volume of selections.
It was not until 1823 that Herrick was reprinted
in full. It remained for the taste of our own
day to multiply editions of him.
In order to set the seal to Herrick's fame, it
is now only needful that some wiseacre should
attribute the authorship of the poems to some
man who could not possibly have written a line
of them. The opportunity presents attractions
that ought to be irresistible. Excepting a hand-
ful of Herrick's college letters there is no scrap
of his manuscript extant; the men who drank
and jested with the poet at the Dog or the Triple
Tun make no reference to him; <1> and in the wide
parenthesis formed by his birth and death we
find as little tangible incident as is discover-
able in the briefer span of Shakespeare's fifty-
two years. Here is material for profundity and
ciphers!
Herrick's second sojourn in London covered
the period between 1648 and 1662, curing which
interim he fades from sight, excepting for the
<1> With the single exception of the writer of some verses in the
<i>Musarum Deliciae</i> (1656) who mentions
That old sack
Young Herrick took to entertain
The Muses in a sprightly vein.
instant when he is publishing his book. If he
engaged in further literary work there are no
evidences of it beyond one contribution to the
"Lacrymae Musarum" in 1649.
He seems to have had lodgings, for a while
at least, in St. Anne's, Westminster. With the
court in exile and the grim Roundheads seated
in the seats of the mighty, it was no longer the
merry London of his early manhood. Time and
war had thinned the ranks of friends; in the
old haunts the old familiar faces were wanting.
Ben Jonson was dead, Waller banished, and
many another comrade "in disgrace with for-
tune and men's eyes." As Herrick walked
through crowded Cheapside or along the dingy
river-bank in those years, his thought must have
turned more than once to the little vicarage in
Devonshire, and lingered tenderly.
On the accession of Charles II. a favorable
change of wind wafted Herrick back to his
former moorings at Dean Prior, the obnoxious
Syms having been turned adrift. This occurred
on August 24, 1662, the seventy-first anniver-
sary of the poet's baptism. Of Herrick's move-
ments after that, tradition does not furnish even
the shadow of an outline. The only notable
event concerning him is recorded twelve years
later in the parish register: "Robert Herrick,
vicker, was buried ye 15" day October, 1674."
He was eighty-three years old. The location of
his grave is unknown. In 1857 a monument to
his memory was erected in Dean Church. And
this is all.
II
THE details that have come down to us touch-
ing Herrick's private life are as meagre as if he
had been a Marlowe or a Shakespeare. But
were they as ample as could be desired they
would still be unimportant compared with the
single fact that in 1648 he gave to the world his
"Hesperides." The environments of the man
were accidental and transitory. The significant
part of him we have, and that is enduring so
long as wit, fancy, and melodious numbers hold
a charm for mankind.
A fine thing incomparably said instantly be-
comes familiar, and has henceforth a sort of
dateless excellence. Though it may have been
said three hundred years ago, it is as modern
as yesterday; though it may have been said
yesterday, it has the trick of seeming to have
been always in our keeping. This quality of
remoteness and nearness belongs, in a striking
degree, to Herrick's poems. They are as novel
to-day as they were on the lips of a choice few
of his contemporaries, who, in reading them in
their freshness, must surely have been aware
here and there of the ageless grace of old idyllic
poets dead and gone.
Herrick was the bearer of no heavy message
to the world, and such message as he had he
was apparently in no hurry to deliver. On this
point he somewhere says:
Let others to the printing presse run fast;
Since after death comes glory, I 'll not haste.
He had need of his patience, for he was long
detained on the road by many of those obstacles
that waylay poets on their journeys to the
printer.
Herrick was nearly sixty years old when he
published the "Hesperides." It was, I repeat,
no heavy message, and the bearer was left an
unconscionable time to cool his heels in the ante-
chamber. Though his pieces had been set to
music by such composers as Lawes, Ramsay,
and Laniers, and his court poems had naturally
won favor with the Cavalier party, Herrick cut
but a small figure at the side of several of his
rhyming contemporaries who are now forgotten.
It sometimes happens that the light love-song,
reaching few or no ears at its first singing, out-
lasts the seemingly more prosperous ode which,
dealing with some passing phase of thought,
social or political, gains the instant applause of
the multitude. In most cases the timely ode is
somehow apt to fade with the circumstance that
inspired it, and becomes the yesterday's edito-
rial of literature. Oblivion likes especially to
get hold of occasional poems. That makes it
hard for feeble poets laureate.
Mr. Henry James once characterized Al-
phonse Daudet as "a great little novelist."
Robert Herrick is a great little poet. The brev-
ity of his poems, for he wrote nothing <i>de longue
haleine</i>, would place him among the minor
singers; his workmanship places him among
the masters. The Herricks were not a family
of goldsmiths and lapidaries for nothing. The
accurate touch of the artificer in jewels and
costly metals was one of the gifts transmitted to
Robert Herrick. Much of his work is as ex-
quisite and precise as the chasing on a dagger-
hilt by Cellini; the line has nearly always that
vine-like fluency which seems impromptu, and
is never the result of anything but austere labor.
The critic who, borrowing Milton's words,
described these carefully wrought poems as
"wood-notes wild" showed a singular lapse of
penetration. They are full of subtle simplicity.
Here we come across a stanza as severely cut as
an antique cameo--the stanza, for instance, in
which the poet speaks of his lady-love's "win-
ter face"--and there a couplet that breaks into
unfading daffodils and violets. The art, though
invisible, is always there. His amatory songs
and catches are such poetry as Orlando would
have liked to hang on the boughs in the forest
of Arden. None of the work is hastily done,
not even that portion of it we could wish had
not been done at all. Be the motive grave or
gay, it is given that faultlessness of form which
distinguishes everything in literature that has
survived its own period. There is no such thing
as "form" alone; it is only the close-grained
material that takes the highest finish. The struc-
ture of Herrick's verse, like that of Blake, is
simple to the verge of innocence. Such rhyth-
mic intricacies as those of Shelley, Tennyson,
and Swinburne he never dreamed of. But his
manner has this perfection: it fits his matter as
the cup of the acorn fits its meat.
Of passion, in the deeper sense, Herrick has
little or none. Here are no "tears from the
depth of some divine despair," no probings into
the tragic heart of man, no insight that goes
much farther than the pathos of a cowslip on a
maiden's grave. The tendrils of his verse reach
up to the light, and love the warmer side of the
garden wall. But the reader who does not de-
tect the seriousness under the lightness misreads
Herrick. Nearly all true poets have been whole-
some and joyous singers. A pessimistic poet,
like the poisonous ivy, is one of nature's sar-
casms. In his own bright pastoral way Herrick
must always remain unexcelled. His limitations
are certainly narrow, but they leave him in the
sunshine. Neither in his thought nor in his
utterance is there any complexity; both are as
pellucid as a woodland pond, content to du-
plicate the osiers and ferns, and, by chance,
the face of a girl straying near its crystal. His
is no troubled stream in which large trout
are caught. He must be accepted on his own
terms.
The greatest poets have, with rare exceptions,
been the most indebted to their predecessors
or to their contemporaries. It has wittily been
remarked that only mediocrity is ever wholly
original. Impressionability is one of the condi-
tions of the creative faculty: the sensitive mind
is the only mind that invents. What the poet
reads, sees, and feels, goes into his blood, and
becomes an ingredient of his originality. The
color of his thought instinctively blends itself
with the color of its affinities. A writer's style,
if it have distinction, is the outcome of a hun-
dred styles.
Though a generous borrower of the ancients,
Herrick appears to have been exceptionally free
from the influence of contemporary minds.
Here and there in his work are traces of his
beloved Ben Jonson, or fleeting impressions
of Fletcher, and in one instance a direct in-
fringement on Suckling; but the sum of
Herrick's obligations of this sort is inconsider-
able.
This indifference to other writers of his time,
this insularity, was doubtless his loss. The more
exalted imagination of Vaughan or Marvell or
Herbert might have taught him a deeper note
than he sounded in his purely devotional poems.
Milton, of course, moved in a sphere apart.
Shakespeare, whose personality still haunted the
clubs and taverns which Herrick frequented on
his first going up to London, failed to lay any
appreciable spell upon him. That great name,
moreover, is a jewel which finds no setting in
Herrick's rhyme. His general reticence rela-
tive to brother poets is extremely curious when
we reflect on his penchant for addressing four-
line epics to this or that individual. They were,
in the main, obscure individuals, whose iden-
tity is scarcely worth establishing. His London
life, at two different periods, brought him into
contact with many of the celebrities of the day;
but his verse has helped to confer immortality
on very few of them. That his verse had the
secret of conferring immortality was one of his
unshaken convictions. Shakespeare had not a
finer confidence when he wrote,
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
than has Herrick whenever he speaks of his own
poetry, and he is not by any means backward in
speaking of it. It was the breath of his nostrils.
Without his Muse those nineteen years in that
dull, secluded Devonshire village would have
been unendurable.
His poetry has the value and the defect of that
seclusion. In spite, however, of his contracted
horizon there is great variety in Herrick's themes.
Their scope cannot be stated so happily as he has
stated it:
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers;
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes;
I write of Youth, of Love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness;
I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece
Of balm, of oil, of spice and ambergris;
I sing of times trans-shifting, and I write
How roses first came red and lilies white;
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The Court of Mab, and of the Fairy King;
I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.
Never was there so pretty a table of contents!
When you open his book the breath of the Eng-
lish rural year fans your cheek; the pages seem
to exhale wildwood and meadow smells, as if
sprigs of tansy and lavender had been shut up
in the volume and forgotten. One has a sense
of hawthorn hedges and wide-spreading oaks,
of open lead-set lattices half hidden with honey-
suckle; and distant voices of the haymakers, re-
turning home in the rosy afterglow, fall dreamily
on one's ear, as sounds should fall when fancy
listens. There is no English poet so thoroughly
English as Herrick. He painted the country
life of his own time as no other has painted it at
any time.
It is to be remarked that the majority of Eng-
lish poets regarded as national have sought their
chief inspiration in almost every land and period
excepting their own. Shakespeare went to Italy,
Denmark, Greece, Egypt, and to many a hitherto
unfooted region of the imagination, for plot and
character. It was not Whitehall Garden, but
the Garden of Eden and the celestial spaces, that
lured Milton. It is the Ode on a Grecian Urn,
The Eve of St. Agnes, and the noble fragment
of Hyperion that have given Keats his spacious
niche in the gallery of England's poets. Shelley's
two masterpieces, Prometheus Unbound and The
Cenci, belong respectively to Greece and Italy.
Browning's The Ring and the Book is Italian;
Tennyson wandered to the land of myth for the
Idylls of the King, and Matthew Arnold's Soh-
rab and Rustum--a narrative poem second in
dignity to none produced in the nineteenth cen-
tury--is a Persian story. But Herrick's "golden
apples" sprang from the soil in his own day,
and reddened in the mist and sunshine of his
native island.
Even the fairy poems, which must be classed
by themselves, are not wanting in local flavor.
Herrick's fairy world is an immeasurable dis-
tance from that of "A Midsummer Night's
Dream." Puck and Titania are of finer breath
than Herrick's little folk, who may be said to
have Devonshire manners and to live in a minia-
ture England of their own. Like the magician
who summons them from nowhere, they are
fond of color and perfume and substantial feasts,
and indulge in heavy draughts--from the cups
of morning-glories. In the tiny sphere they in-
habit everything is marvelously adapted to their
requirement; nothing is out of proportion or out
of perspective. The elves are a strictly religious
people in their winsome way, "part pagan, part
papistical;" they have their pardons and indul-
gences, their psalters and chapels, and
An apple's-core is hung up dried,
With rattling kernels, which is rung
To call to Morn and Even-song;
and very conveniently,
Hard by, I' th' shell of half a nut,
The Holy-water there is put.
It is all delightfully naive and fanciful, this elfin-
world, where the impossible does not strike one
as incongruous, and the England of 1648 seems
never very far away.
It is only among the apparently unpremedi-
tated lyrical flights of the Elizabethan dramatists
that one meets with anything like the lilt and
liquid flow of Herrick's songs. While in no de-
gree Shakespearian echoes, there are epithalamia
and dirges of his that might properly have fallen
from the lips of Posthumus in "Cymbeline."
This delicate epicede would have fitted Imogen:
Here a solemne fast we keepe
While all beauty lyes asleepe;
Husht be all things; no noyse here
But the toning of a teare,
Or a sigh of such as bring
Cowslips for her covering.
Many of the pieces are purely dramatic in
essence; the Mad Maid's Song, for example.
The lyrist may speak in character, like the
dramatist. A poet's lyrics may be, as most of
Browning's are, just so many <i>dramatis per-
sonae</i>. "Enter a Song singing" is the stage-
direction in a seventeenth-century play whose
name escapes me. The sentiment dramatized in
a lyric is not necessarily a personal expression.
In one of his couplets Herrick neatly denies that
his more mercurial utterances are intended pre-
sentations of himself:
To his Book's end this last line he'd have placed--
Jocund his Muse was, but his Life was chaste.
In point of fact he was a whole group of im-
aginary lovers in one. Silvia, Anthea, Electra,
Perilla, Perenna, and the rest of those lively
ladies ending in <i>a</i>, were doubtless, for the most
part, but airy phantoms dancing--as they should
not have danced--through the brain of a senti-
mental old bachelor who happened to be a vicar
of the Church of England. Even with his over-
plus of heart it would have been quite impossible
for him to have had enough to go round had
there been so numerous actual demands upon it.
Thus much may be conceded to Herrick's
verse: at its best it has wings that carry it nearly
as close to heaven's gate as any of Shakespeare's
lark-like interludes. The brevity of the poems
and their uniform smoothness sometimes produce
the effect of monotony. The crowded richness
of the line advises a desultory reading. But one
must go back to them again and again. They
bewitch the memory, having once caught it,
and insist on saying themselves over and over.
Among the poets of England the author of the
"Hesperides" remains, and is likely to remain,
unique. As Shakespeare stands alone in his vast
domain, so Herrick stands alone in his scanty
plot of ground.
Shine, Poet! in thy place, and be content.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Ponkapog Papers by Aldrich